History

Kite Aerial Photography is as old as photography itself. Early photographers naturally wanted to exploit the new found ability to capture a moment in time. What better than to try and take images from the air.

The French Military saw the advantage of being able to see over the horizon and had limited success with ballons. But it was Frenchman Arthur Batut in 1888 who managed to record what is widely accepted as the first photograph from a Kite. From there the next recorded milestone were the images taken by George Lawrence of the 1906  San Francisco Earthquake.

My route to all this came through trying to create what used to be known as bubble panoramas. We are going back to about 1995 when something called Omniview came onto the market showing spectacular walk-through images of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes, the Internet was still relatively new and digital cameras were not for the masses. Images had to be scanned and processed the first proprietary software I used was Photo-Vista v1.0, in 1996, there were no limitations on fields of view. Behind all this gathering hype and an eye for the main chance by commercial software companies, a German Mathematics Professor, Helmut Dersch, was quietly compiling and recompiling his Java based program which mathematically restructured images so that they could be viewed in various projections, on which much of  the new proprietary software was based.

I’m not sure how the resulting legal battles broke out, were fought or indeed have they been won and by whom? But enthusiastic photographers have continued to use the original Pano Tools software Helmut produced and supported the compilers of graphic user interfaces, such as PTgui who have brought the techniques to a wider audience by simplifying the process using such interfaces.

One of those very early exponents of Pano Tools was Philippe Hurbain, whose site I visited regularly. It was from here that I saw his kite pages. But it never progressed from my point until years later I came across James Gentles pages by accident researching what was on the web for the Falkirk Wheel. From that point I just had to have a go at KAP.

I’ve started my quest by compiling “aerial bubbles” for that is how I came to learn panoramic photography as I’ve said back in 95. In fact in I think it was 1996 the company I worked for then launched a website for Radio Key 103 and Piccadilly Radio in Manchester to celebrate the Manchester Festival that year. I still have the original spins I did for them and will put them up here in time. But I’m going to revisit the subject as with the advent of cheaper digital cameras and the like, the process is now so much simpler and fast with more affordable computing power.