Photos at kite festival?

[Reddog690]

I am a beginner photographer going to a Kite Festival this weekend. What tips can you offer for taking some decent photos.

I have a full frame camera various lenses a monopod and a tripod at my disposal.

Thanks!

 

[Mark S Abeln]

I am a beginner photographer going to a Kite Festival this weekend. What tips can you offer for taking some decent photos.

I have a full frame camera various lenses a monopod and a tripod at my disposal.

I assume the kites are brightly colored?

I see two basic problems: losing the colors on the kites and exposure problems.

If it is a bright sunny day, you might want to fix your camera’s white balance to ‘Daylight’ for more uniformity between pictures. You may even want to do a manual white balance off of a white piece of paper.

Likewise, it’s easy to harm the colors of the kites or the blue skies due to bad exposure, and so this might be a good time to try manual exposure. You can put a white piece of paper in direct sunlight, and adjust your exposure so that the camera historgrams are just short of clipping: or alternatively, the image capture is close to white as possible without losing any detail and texture in the paper.

Now I would expect that both of these adjustments will change with the time of day, and don’t forget to change your settings back to ‘Auto’ if you are done for the day or if you’re shooting in the shade.

Understand this is very basic advice, and there are better things that require some expertise.

 

[AK_hiker]

I guess you can think of kites as very slow moving (?) planes and get tips from the plane photographers.

And dont forget to get some low level ones of the kite flyers and their kites in same photo.

GC

 

[yardcoyote]

With my gear, I'd class kites in with birds and expect to use my 55-300mm zoom (on my crop sensor Pentax) to photograph the kites in the air. I would also carry my Fuji X-M1 with the 27mm pancake prime to photograph the scene on the ground.