Maiden KAP flight for Dopero

My Jones Airfoils maxi dopero pro arrived in January, but has had relatively few outings so far. In fact, it had to wait until Berck Festival in April before it took to the sky. Whilst it has had a couple of other flights, today was to be its first outing with a KAP rig.

Conditions couldn't have been better for it really. We had planned to fly at Dunorlan Park in Tunbridge Wells and Gerty had given directions to park in Bayhall Road. When I got there, Bill and Gert were already there, and there was the gentlest of breezes. So it seemed an obvious choice to give the dopero an outing. At the time, I wasn't sure that I would get any KAP done, as I didn't think there was enough wind. But the dopero launched easily and climbed steadily into the sky, and there was sufficient pull on the line to make me determined to get some KAP.

After last weeks problems, I had spent some time during the week playing with camera settings and getting some test shots. I hoped I had got the camera configured in a way that would give me some decent output.

So with the rig fixed about 100 feet below the kite, I let out line until the rig was about 50 feet off the ground, and wandered off to see what we could see. I was determined to get some photos of the lake, but I had no idea what else was around (I haven't been to Dunorlan Park before).After getting some low level shots, I decided to allow some more lineout to see if we could get some more shots from on high, and to see how the kite reacted. The kite was absolutely brilliant. It did tend to clmb overhead, and a couple of times when the wind dropped away to nothing, the kite was floating on thermals whiile the camera stayed suspended, gently coming down, then a sight breeze would add tension to the line, the camera would start to climb and then so would the kite.

A very successful afternoon KAP. I will go to Dunorlan Park again, but next time I go, I will try to get into the carpark on Hall Hollow Road. The event field is great for general kite flying, but the field on the other side of the hedge near the lake seems to have plenty of space between the trees, is accessible from the carpark, and offers a far greater range of photographic subjects. As usual, the photos are on my flickr stream, but below is a sample:

Margate photos

Well I've managed to get most of the photos from Margate sorted and adjusted so we can at least see them. As usual, they are on my flickr photostream. But here is a sample. Ladies, and those of a nervous disposition should look away now!

Margate big sky - day 2

Another fabulous day at Margate, this time much more windy though. In fact too much wind for much of the day. When I left home Maidstone was shrouded in fog and there was absolutely no wind. It didn't look very promising. By Faversham, the fog had gone, but it was still very cloudy, but Margate was in sunshine.

Gerty Nagged me to launch either the (new) leek, or the owl. In the end, we went for both. The leek is most impressive! Before long, the wind was at its playful best, resulting in most of the lifters coming to the ground. The owl was allowed to fly on its own for a while, and the leek was left out all day as a ground bouncer, and still worked fine.

To more mundane subject and KAP. I'd repaired the rig and was ready to go. In the conditions, I decided to take pity on Matt and come down to a 56 inch Rok. The conditions were very playful, which meant we did not get very stable flight, but we toured the main arena clicking away. However, when we recovered kite and camera, I was disappointed to find most shots were over exposed. I'm using a custm setting of shutter priority with Canon "safeshot". I have the speed set at 1/2000 and the idea is that safeshot should adjust the speed to the highest it can get away with in the conditions. Looking at the exif data for some of the photographs, it seems as if it is taking all pictures at 1/250 and f4. This is most annoying, but I will have to experiment with the settings to see if I can find out exactly what is going on. I may be able to recover some of the pictures once I have processed them. I've been experimenting with RAW image data. The file sizes are mighty big, which take a long time to write to the card. This means I can't get as many shots per outing as with jpeg files. I will have to lok at tweaking the file size. I've also got a fairly steep learning curve in understanding how to process the raw files to get the best out of them, but hey, its all good fun? Meanwhile, I'm seriously of going back to the digital Elph 400!

So hopefully, I'll get a couple of decent images out of the trip, which will end up on Flickr.

Margate Big Sky part 1

Saturday arrived and time for the new kite festival in Margate, so pootled off to arrive there at about 9:30, after all the work had been done, but before the events started.

Met up with some old friends again, and made some new ones into the bargain. A fairly windless morning meant that most kites were lying on the ground, and the display teams were having to work overtime. After lunch the breeze picked up a little, so I decide to have a go at some KAP. Everything tested so I entrusted the rig to my favourite rok and set off to get some photos, with Matt piloting the kite.

Spent a good while moving round the site and hoping for some good shots, and eventually recovered the camera. Took a look at the results, and only three images saved. Only 2 of them were anything approaching usable. So what's wrong here. Some diagnostic tests show that there is a problem with the IR. I can't fix it on the field, and don't know whether it is the LED or the sensor. All I know is that the receiver is getting the signal fine. Looks like a busy night.

So as the wind dropped as the tide changed again, I headed for home and went straight out into the workshop to try to find out what the problem is. Fortunately I've got a 360 LED that I can use to test the camera. This shows that the camera is fuctioning fine, so it must be the standard LED that is the cause of the problem. Again fortunately, I've still got the finger servo fitted to the rig from the days of using my other camera. Unfortunately the shutter button on this camera is in a competely different position, so time to go to work. An hour later, the rig is back together, having drilled out the rivets, moved the servo, added some extra spacers, fixed everything back together. Time for a test, yep working fine. So provided we get some decent weather tomorrow, we can go out and try again.

Long period of absence

Well I've not been flying kites much this year, so I've had precious few opportunities to KAP. There are many reasons for this:

I'm now vice captain of my archery club, so spend a lot of time at compteitions
The weather in the UK has been generally awful, limiting opportunities on my flying days
Lack of decent subject matter to inspire me.

Still this last weekend I went out determined to KAP, only to be disappointed.

On Saturday, I attended a "Japanese Festival" in Gillingham. This sounded like it would be a good opportunity to KAP. Unfortunately the weather was definitely not on our side. I think we had sufficient wind to fly kites for about half an hour. Other than that I spent all day struggling to keep a roller airborne, by working the line all the time. Glorious sunny day though and made some new friends. Even if I had been able to get airborne, there wouldn't have been much to KAP as all of the sideshows were under the trees, so I wouldn't have been able to get close enough to get any decent shots.

Surely Sunday would be better. I was attending tghe Wick Country Park kite event at Wickford in Essex. When I got out at about 8am to move my car, there was a reasonable breeze, and this looked promising. But when I got to the Wick at about midday, the wind had picked up considerably, and was very gusty, turbulent and basically horrible. I decided straight away that there was no way I was going to entrust my rig to a kite line, and made do with some ground based shots of the kite, which are on my Flickr pages. Maybe next year.

Next weekend is the first Margate Big Sky kite event. I'm hoping for better conditions, so I can get some aerials from there.