After spending a bit of time looking at the DPReview collection of enthusiast compact cameras and almost, almost buying a Nikon P6000 I took the plunge and bought a Panasonic LX3 instead. My first impressions are very favorable. I am delighted with the 24-mm (equivalent) f2.0 lens, which does not seem prone to vignetting or excessive softness in the corners. In ground tests the image stabilization seems quite effective. And the camera processes RAW files at a pretty fast clip. So far, the in-camera jpg processing seems to be doing a very credible job and has me wondering if I need to shoot RAW after all. I have the camera set to shoot both and will spend some time doing comparisons between the two.

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Yesterday, I received a request from the folks over at MAKE for “10 or so must haves for folks who like to take photos with kites, gear, books, etc names, urls, what it is and why.” They are apparently putting together a series of holiday gift guides. I put together a (very) quick response and began to wonder what else should be there. What would you add or delete?

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I will be one of four artists exhibiting work in Water: the Essence of Life, a show curated by Howard Chambers of Sentient Salon. Look for an opening on 11 September at a.Muse Gallery in the Mission.

http://www.sentientsalon.com/upcoming_events.asp

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As the summer progresses, I continue to work on the South Bay Salt Pond project. The last week or so was focused on mounting an exhibit of photographs at the Coyote Point Museum in San Mateo, California. It was great fun putting this together. The general theme fell out of my recent work assembling a collage of colors and textures from my salt pond photographs. The final exhibit contains an introductory panel and 50 photographs.

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A lively and articulate Leslie Scrivener of the Toronto Star called to interview me for an article about Canadian KAPper Roger Gunter. As interviews go this was a fun conversation and I enjoyed the resulting article as well.

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File this under ” the apple does not fall far from the tree.”

Earlier in the year I worked with Charlotte Buchen, a graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism, to develop a KAP segment for Current TV. The early feedback from Current was that they were targeting a “younger demographic” and could we make adjustments along that line? By chance, my son Charlie had tagged along on one of the demonstration outings with Charlotte. They put their heads together and the project morphed into the story of Charlie developing his own rig. Charlie went through a couple of iterations of molding carbon fiber cradle components but then time pressures led to modifying one of my earlier cradles for his camera. It all makes a father proud.

The segment, which lasts about six minutes, is running now on Current TV’s cable channel and also on their WWW site.

http://current.com/items/89113737_in_the_kite_s_eye

Charlie graduated in Mechanical Engineering from UC San Diego about a year ago and has been working in Berkeley since then. It is great fun to have him around. Of late he has been playing around with pole photography and posting on Flickr as BarleyBenton.

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In late Spring, science writer in training Jane Liaw of UC Santa Cruz began a writing project about my KAP activities. Jane has been entertainingly thorough, interviewing folks ranging from my family to former students and other KAPpers. While the magnum opus is still in development, a preview is available on WWW site of KQED, San Francisco’s Public Broadcasting System station. There, by coincidence, Jane has been interning with the KQED QUEST Project which is separately doing a profile of me as a photographer under their Your Photos on Quest (YPOQ) series. The YPOQ segment is scheduled for broadcast on 26 August.

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I am still buzzing from the exuberance of Maker Faire and thought I would post a pointer to a set of PAP images taken at the event. They now say that Maker Faire attendance was over 65,000 people. It was so crowded that it really didn’t make sense from a safety point of view to fly a kite in the gusty ~15 mph winds we had that weekend. Sorry to have missed submitting for the WWKW pool but that is just the way it worked out. Next year!

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Fresh with enthusiasm from my recent Fled III construction project and trying to make the best of a rainy period, I recently made a large, lightweight Rokakku. This one is sewn from 0.65 oz. North Sails fabric and framed with relatively light Sky Shark tubes. The idea was that my workaday 7.5 foot (2.3 M) tall Kevin Shannon Rokkaku would continue to serve the slot just below my Sutton 30 in wind range so this new kite would be very light to serve when the sturdier Rokkaku is insufficient.

The kite is 8′-2″ (2.5 M) tall by 6′-9″ (2.06 M) wide with a total weight of 15.5 oz (440 g) of which 6 oz. (170 g) is a lightweight frame made from SkyShark P400 and P200 tubes. I like these tubes as they have linear as well as radial carbon fiber reinforcement and can be joined with an internal ferrule.

My first substantial test flight was today and the kite was very stable. It developed sufficient lift for my Digital Elph rig when the wind was only 3.5 mph or so on the ground. Later when the wind filled in to 7.5 mph or so the frame was still holding its shape fairly well. I would guess that substantial deformation would set in by 10 mph or so.

This ground view shows me, at 6′-4″ (1.93 M) tall, for scale.

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Jessica Leber at Columbia’s School of Journalism put together a pretty nice article on KAP. I connected Jessica with local KAPper Scott Dunn and she supplemented the article with telephone interviews of Craig Wilson, James Aber, Ali Fujino, and myself. I learned from the article that the Centers for Disease Control assembled a KAP rig and used it to assess refuge camps in Africa’s Sahel Desert – wow. This went out on the wire through Columbia’s news service:

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