My first kite flight had many stabillity problems. In order to give my camera better stability when hanging from a kite, I built a Picavet  suspension. Pierre Picavet was a French inventor, balloonist and kite enthusiast who created this suspension in 1912. The idea is that no matter how the kite moves, the camera will stay stable as the rigging slides back and forth.

Pierre Picavet 1912

Picavet Suspension

Tied the camera to a five foot painter’s pole and tried to make a micro-map of our western side yard. The yard is difficult as it is long and not very wide with the house on one side and a 6 ft wall on the other. I selected 30 pictures and stitched them together using a simple stitching program called AutoStitch. It did OK except the walkway is straight, not curved. I could probably fix this in Photoshop.

Side yard stitched

 I next tried Agisoft Photoscan Pro. The program breaks the photos into a point cloud and then creates a 3D surface and textures the surface with the original picture. The high walls cause all sorts of problems but at least it is straight. I put marker cards to mark gps coordinates but the error on my Garmin was greater than the length of the yard. I do know the size of the cards so I could set a scale.

Agisoft walls

Agisoft ortho