Kiholo Bay Inlet - Kite Aerial (KAP)

My third attempt at doing a synth of the inlet at Kiholo Bay on the Big Island of Hawai`i. I got a lot of excellent feedback from my previous attempt, from which I tried to make two synths. This was done with all of that advice in mind.

The inlet at Kiholo Bay on the Big Island of Hawai`i is a fantastic place to see honu, or Pacific green sea turtles, swimming in the water or sunning on the rocks. The water in the inlet is highly stratified, with different salinities and opacities at different levels of the pond. The bottom is actually quite deep, and rocky. But because the lower levels of the water are an opaque aquamarine, the pond looks much more shallow than it actually is. Honu will forage deep in the pond, then surface like birds coming up out of the clouds.

This is almost entirely done with autoKAP using a prototype controller. All of the pictures were taken using a 6' rokkaku kite to lift the camera. The camera was in a Brooks BBKK KAP rig, triggered using a GentLED-CHDK cable and a CHDK script running on the camera.

Several passes were made up and down the pond with the camera at different altitudes. I stopped several times to make hemispherical panoramas at each location. Because of constraints with generating synths, over 350 images were removed from the set because of solid patches of water, blurriness, specular reflections off of water, etc. Still not 100% synthy, but I don't think I want to re-visit this one again.