World Wide KAP Week starts

NOW!

The goal of WWKW (World Wide KAP Week) is:

"Everyone gets out wherever they are, as much as they can, during WWKW, and does KAP or something related to KAP (public speaking, gallery showing of KAP photos, etc.) Pictures are posted to the WWKW Flickr group for folks to share. If we're doing a book again this year, unmodified photos are submitted to the person coordinating the book along with captions and a block of text describing yourself, your experience during WWKW, etc. " (Credits: Tom Benedict).

Okay, that's what WWKW is but what is KAP?

KAP is the acronym for Kite Aerial Photography. Basically it's aerial photography done with a camera suspended from a kite line. The rigs for holding and triggering the camera range from a simple pendulum with a single-use camera and a rubber band to trigger the shutter to complex multichannel radio-controlled rigs with gyroscopes to steady the camera and video downlinks so the photographer can actually see what the camera above sees. My rig falls somewhere in between.

I built my first KAP rig just before I moved to Puerto Rico but didn't actually use it until I got here. I certainly didn't invent KAP. That honor is usually given to Arthur Batut, a Frenchman who took the first know KAP photos in the late 1880s in Labruguiere, France. Right now, there are some 1,872 members of the Flickr KAP group world-wide. The Flickr group is a great showcase of the best KAP work.

Few people know that one of the most famous KAP photos is in fact a KAP photo. In the days after the 1906 earthquake that leveled San Francisco, a photographer named George Lawrence made this photo of the devastated city:

It was not taken from an airplane or a hot air balloon. Rather, Mr. Lawrence "took this remarkable kite aerial photograph in 1906 as San Francisco lay devastated by the '06 earthquake. Less than 20 years after Batut's first efforts Lawrence used a train of up to nine large Conyne kites to loft a moving-slit panoramic camera. The camera weighed 49 pounds and was lifted to a height of approximately 2,000 feet anchored by a wire tether. The shutter was released via an electric wire to produce a negative measuring 18" x 48". (credit: Chris Benton, Kite Aerial Photography)

My goal for WWKW is to KAP a different, new location each day. My plan is to post the best photo each day here, on the blog, and the best of the series on Flickr. Stay tuned. And check out the two Flickr pages to see what's new in the world of KAP.