Kite aerial photography appeals to that part of me, perhaps of all of us, that would slip our earthly bonds and see the world from new heights. An aerial view offers a fresh perspective of familiar landscapes and in doing so challenges our spatial sensibilities, our grasp of relationships.
KAP is a natural fit for Benton, who says architects also think about bird's-eye perspectives and relationships between buildings in the landscape.
KAP was invented more than a century ago, but fell out of favor as military and commercial photography from airplanes became popular. In past few decades, artists interested in a unique perspective from the sky have revived the art. Today, thousands of people worldwide pursue KAP, and Benton is one respected example. He builds the rigs that hold his camera aloft from parts he finds around the house. The camera cradle, for instance, is re-purposed from an old computer hard drive. Benton, who took his first aerial photographs at Cesar Chavez Park in 1995, has built every rig himself; he's now on his tenth.
Benton's creation is impressive. He has set a camera in a wooden frame, and engineered a remote mechanism that pushes the shutter button and can move his camera to vertical or horizontal positions. To take his aerial photos, he handles the spool of kite string with one hand and works the radio controller that remotely manipulates the camera with the other.
At Cesar Chavez Park today, I watch as Benton hooks the kite to a park bench after it's aloft, then attaches the camera to the kite line, rigged in a pulley system that allows Benton to move the camera up and down the line. He snaps a few photos of himself at different heights to show me.
Benton peers up at his rig as he positions it for some
photo-taking. Credit: Jane Liaw.
Benton doesn't use real-time video to help compose his shots, as some kite aerial photographers do. With video, the photographer on the ground sees exactly what the camera's shot will look like. Instead, Benton "interrogates the landscape." He thinks through the shot, forms a hypothesis on what he might see if he were looking through the camera lens in the sky, takes the picture, and compares his imaginings to the actual shot.
Benton has in recent years developed a fascination with the south San Francisco Bay. For several years, he has been documenting the area as part of the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Hidden Ecologies project. Benton takes kite aerial photographs of the South Bay salt flats and other Bay geographies, while a microbiologist takes "microcinematography"-- photos of tiny critters such as bacteria and diatoms that inhabit these ecosystems, captured with the help of field microscopes.
Benton has published his photos on a blog: majestic overviews of the South Bay salt ponds that run the color spectrum from red to green to pink, depending on how the microscopic organisms adapt to varying salinity levels.
Cris will be collaborating with KQED staff on our next 2-minute "Your Photos on QUEST" segment for broadcast and web distribution. It will air on August 26, 2008.
His stunning set of Kite Aerial Photography of South San Francisco Bay did a wonderful job of expressing a sense of locale, with a passion for nature, via a process that captures something unexpected and essential.
In his own words:
"...juxtapositions abound – dendritic marsh channels as foils for the straight lines of infrastructure; wild openness confronting the confines of encroaching capitalism; salt ponds, vividly colored by the aforementioned halophiles, constrained by subtly hued mud and marsh; derelict, forgotten engineering works faintly echoing their former functions. ."
Benton makes his own kite rigs, but if you're interested in taking up the hobby and are daunted by putting together your own equipment, you can also buy ready-made rigs online from Brooks Leffler, a pioneer of modern KAP.
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Cris Benton inspects his kite aerial photography rig