While I was taking this photo there was a fighter plane cruising around the islands, quite high up, but after a time the pilot must have spotted my kite. Nobody believes this story, but he went into a dive and flew right under the kite string—a macho pilot having fun. It was shatteringly loud! I rolled up my kite and left the scene of the crime as quickly as possible.This activity is now called KAP: Kite Aerial Photography. The digital camera is on a special rig that hangs from the string and it keeps the camera both level and stable. The camera is triggered by radio control. It can also be rotated with a servo to do panoramic shots. It's a sophisticated system that gives brilliant results. Some of the kites are parafoils which means they can be folded up very small.
I was doing this stuff in the 1970s with a wood-framed box kite, a cheapo camera, and a burning fuse to release the shutter. I hadn't heard of other people making kite photos at that time, but I am certainly not claiming "I did it first." There is a famous kite photo made by George Laurence, San Francisco in Ruins, taken after the 1906 earthquake with a panoramic 17 x 48 inch plate camera, and the very first kite photos were made in 1887.The speaking machine and singing machine are timeless inventions which never cease to garner interest. What fascinates you about electronic sounds and how it differs from the human voice?
Speech synthesis is the art of producing what sounds like human speech without using any form of recording.Machine, MotorMouth, and Singing Machine talk like you and me. That is, with vocal chords (of a sort!) and a flow of air. There are no loudspeakers. You can see how the speech sounds are produced. In the case of the Singing Machine and MotorMouth the mouth is built using Plexiglas so you can see the lips and tongue moving and valves opening to admit the air.The speech sounds are produced acoustically as in a musical instrument so I suppose you could call this "analogue speech synthesis," although the motors for the tongue and lips are digitally controlled. Electronic synthetic speech, on the other hand, comes out of a loudspeaker. It is becoming so good that it is difficult to distinguish it from a recording. But I am more interested in making something where you can actually see how it works.