Single-Serving Photo

Part One: Kites

Chris Benton is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He also straps his digital SLR onto a kite string and takes some of the most amazing aerial photographs I have ever seen. Chris combines a truly gifted eye for composition with a an engineer’s savvy for mechanical problem solving.

Using kites and remote-controlled camera rigs built by hand in his basement, Chris captures the world top-down, photographing everything from people and buildings to the patterns of nature. Watch this video from Make Magazine and be stunned!

Kite Aerial Photography on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Chris is quick to humbly share his experience and tips for aerial kite photography on his website (graciously hosted by Berkeley!)

I was blown away by the evolution of Chris’s camera rigs, which grew from fixed harnesses with rudimentary mechanical timers based on elastic bands, Silly Putty, and disposable cameras, to what he now uses, a remote-controlled, servo motor-driven, three-axis robot.

It’s definitely not commonplace for someone to possess both a grasp of electronic and mechanical engineering and a hawk-eye for artistic composition. Chris Benton has both.

Part Two: Cars

Aside from being an avid photographer, I admit to a streak of BMW fanboyism. When it comes to sports cars that are still solid daily drivers that make you feel like you’ve personally discovered the center of the universe and you’re sitting directly within it, nobody does it better than BMW.

To hype the release of their latest creation, the Z4 Roadster, BMW hired artist Robin Rhode to dip the Z4’s tires in multi-colored paints and drive it around like a fingerpainting on a warehouse scale. This was one of the most indulgent marketing campaigns I could think of.

I realize this isn’t strictly photography-related, but it is certainly art-related. If you feel gypped, go look at these photographs from the event

And here is a pretty cool video of how they put this thing together:

The next time you’re out shooting, or sitting around the house thinking about how next to use that studio space you set up in the basement, or the garage, or the attic… Think about breaking out of the box and doing something completely different. Robin Rhode did, and I think it came out pretty well.

It’s been quite a hiatus for me and for Single-Serving Photo. My last post here was back in February, and so much has happened since then! First of all, if you’re reading this, thank you for not deleting me from your feed reader or taking me off of your bookmarks list. I know I haven’t been the chatterbox I once was, but I don’t like to post link wrap-ups and two-sentence thought fragments just for the sake of putting something online.

Anyway, on with the show!

First things first, JPG Magazine is back! After being effectively shut down due to budget and business problems, JPG has resuscitated itself mostly thanks to the outpouring of support from its community and highly visible demonstrations such as savejpg.com which presumably gave investors the confidence they needed to pump more necessary capital into the parent company of JPG Magazine, 8020 Media.

Now that JPG has risen from the dead, maybe I’ll actually contribute something! You should, too.

Second, my little hands-on instruction business, ArtPhotoWorkshops.com is going to be doing a series of low-cost, short “photo-walk” workshops in the New England area. Starting with Cape Cod in a week and then Boston after that, I plan to take us out to Newport, Rhode Island, possibly Northampton, Massachusetts, maybe even out to the Quabbin Reservoir for the nature lovers.

If there are places you’d like to explore and learn technique, composition, and mechanics of photography, leave a comment and I’ll see if we can visit them!

I just returned from Las Vegas and Death Valley on a workshop, no photos to show yet, but I think it was an extremely successful trip. Death Valley is by far one of America’s most impressive sights, I recommend seeing it once in your life (or if you’re crazy like me, twice). Las Vegas is a very challenging location to photograph, but I think I was able to snag at least a small number of cool images in between games of craps and tall beers!

There are a few other cool things I want to share, so stay tuned for kite photography, painting with a car, and my opinions on both.