Camera Phone + Kite

Yesterday was a beautiful day here on Prince Edward Island: just the right amount of sun, warm but not too warm, and a gentle breeze in the air. We took the opportunity to go out to Argyle Shore Provincial Park with our new neighbours for a barbeque, and what with Catherine’s kite obsession, there were plenty of kits in our armoury, ready for flying. I took the opportunity to try an experiment: I popped my Nokia N95 mobile phone in a clear-plastic kite holder and strapped it to the underbelly of our largest kite and set it to start shooting video.

The phone proved too heavy for the size of the kite and the amount of wind, but I like the result enough to edit it together into a small video. My favourite aspect of this little project is that patterns of movement emerge when, as I did in iMovie, the action is sped up 200%.

None of this holds a candle to the interesting work my friend Stefan Kellner is doing with tiny helicopters in Berlin. Indeed a Flickr search for kite photography reveals all manner of fascinating experiments like this, most far more successful than mine.

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