On Saturday Matt and I (mainly Matt) built the rig for to attach my new camera to a kite line. Below are the results. On Memorial Day I took the whole setup out for a spin. It was windy, which is good, but it was very windy, which is bad. It was pretty much a constant 20 mph. I used one of my stabler roks and through some tails on it as well to help keep it in the sky. Once I attached the camera things got a bit wobbly, and the camera was really getting tossed side to side in the high winds, but I persevered and despite some attempts by random annoying individuals to knock my kite out of the sky I managed to get a few usable images! After the field got overrun with picnickers I packed up and went home to grill some hamburgers.

To see how this all worked out, check out my new panoramas section above.

Amy had this past Monday off from work for her birthday, so we spent a night in Sonoma. Sunday we went up 101 to Alexander Valley. There we tasted at Trentadue and Sausal. Both were very nice, though nothing particularly special. Trentadue had a nice red table wine and rose we picked up, sadly they were not tasting their grappa. If you like port, though, they did have a separate tasting for a flight of those. Sausal specializes in Zins, so were excited to go there. They were certainly nice, some of their oldest vines were 130 yrs old, but they weren't quite as jammy as those grown in hotter regions that we tend to like. On the plus side, the winery had two friendly black cats who around and said hi to visitors. Sunday evening we had dinner at the always wonderful Della Santina Restaurant in Sonoma and stayed at the Sonoma Valley Inn where we had our wedding. Monday we hit the usual Imagery Winery and Chateau Potelle before heading to the Napa Outlets. All in all a fun and relaxing weekend.

Just when Amy thought my camera obsessing was waning, I got another. I picked up the Nikon Coolpix P5000 specifically to use with the fisheye lens from my old Coolpix 990. Below is an example of what a fisheye image from this camera looks like. Fry is clearly a vicious killer cat. Aside from being a full featured compact camera for every day use, the real reason I got this camera is to send up with my kites for what's known as Kite Aerial Photography (KAP). Once I have a rig built to hook up to the kite line, I can send the camera a couple hundred feet up and with just a couple of fisheye images, make a full 360 degree immersive panorama. Here's a good site for you to see what I'm referring to: http://scotthaefner.com/kap/360panos/ This guy has some fantastic information about how these are made if you're curious. Anyhow, hopefully sometime in the near future I too will have some to share.

Oh and by the way, for those interested, I think I've set up an RSS feed. But since I never use it, who knows.

Having dropped Amy off at the airport to head to her conference, I realized that I had a car on a weekday with a lot of wind. So I packed up the bags and headed to the prime kiting spot at the western edge of Caesar Chavez Park. All you have to do is throw your kites out of the car and you're ready to fly, plus if you turn around and there is no fog you can see San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. However, on the weekends this are is crowded and a pain to fly at. But today the field was empty and the winds were 15-20 mph (strong!) out of the west. My goal was to fly all of my Roks, but sadly I'd lost a piece to one, so I got fly at 7/8 (if you count the three in the stack separately). As long as I was having my own kite show I decided to keep putting things in the sky, and you can see the results below.

Click the photo for more:

Last Thursday, May 10th, was Amy's birthday. She had just been in San Diego to help at a conference, so I picked her up from the airport with some balloons in hand, brought her home to an attention starved cat, and prepared her dinner. Next weekend we'll probably head up to wine country to celebrate properly. In the meantime, here is a portrait of Amy I took the last time we were in wine county :)

This past weekend marked the beginning of a heat wave here in the bay area. Right now though, I'm safely underground away from the sun in the comfort of my lab. Meanwhile, outside it's breaking temperature records in the upper 80s. On Sunday I went kiting with my friend Matt Bush. It was his first time kiting so I pulled out a little of everything. By late afternoon it had finally cleared out enough to stack my 8 ft Flexi's. I hadn't flown these in years, and I remembered why it was that these kites originally brought me into kiting; they're big, bright, and pull like a truck!

Go Matt!

Amy says that Fry is the most photogenic in the family...I'll let you be the judge of that. Click the photo below for more Fry photos.