Power Kiting

Raina.Rae

These are a few pictures I took of my roommate flying a power kite on sand dunes. I think I need to get a wider angle lens so I can get infront of him and the kite in the pictures with out being in the way.

1.

2.

3.

InsuredDisaster

I think it needs a bit of fill flash on the guy. I'm not a big fan of the power lines in the first picture.


Those kites are crazy. I saw a guy a while back being dragged across a soccer field while he ws flying one.

cdub

I'm sure he wasn't a fan of the power lines either!

MT Stringer

Not perfect, but...
I managed to lighten the pic a little, adjust the levels a bit and increase saturation and contrast. And I cropped out extra stuff that isn't relative to the pic.

I think you can save these pics and make them look better with just a little work. I used Elements 6.0
Mike

Darren Troy C

Would be cool with an UWA standing just behind him and focus running up the lines and placing the kite in the corner of the frame.

InsuredDisaster

Raina.Rae, if you do end up getting one of these ultra wides, then you'll need to expect to get in extremely close to have a good effect with them. With a fisheye for example, you might have to close within a few feet of the guy to have a good shot. So if you are trying to stay out of the guy's way, then wide angle is not the way to go.


What I think could really help these photos is if you either get closer, or zoom in a lot more. Leave a little bit if sky for the kite, but see all the empty space below the guy and above the kite?

Also, one other thing you might try is switching to manual exposure mode, and bringing down the overall exposure a bit, maybe a stop. Don't darken the kite too much, but just enough to help saturate the sky's colors. Then use a flash to light up the guy. I'm not sure if you've got the flash power to do this, but I'd certainly give it a shot or two (or 200 ) to see if you can make the sky pop a bit more.

With that being said, I like #2 perhaps the best. The guy is closest. I do think it needs a bit of flash, and a lower shooting position on your part to try to cut out the house, as well as shooting so as to cut down on the some of the extra sky.

I do think this is a great subject, as there is certainly a battle going on, and you can see the tension.

Raina.Rae

Thank you for all the comments. I figured I need to zoom more but I only brought one lens (18 - 55 mm) with me on this mini-vacation. I was shooting in manual mode, I never thought of using a flash outside.

It was an overcast day when I shot these pictures, with light drizzel/rain off and on. A storm ended up passing through about 2 hours after I shot these.

Well it is a learning process, and I'm sure we'll go back out to dunes next summer so I'll get to try again.