One of our Flickr friends, Murray Neil, a New Zealand bike culture head and Xtracycle rider, combines his love of photography, kites, and biking in his crystal clear aerial shots. He fabricated his own kite-based aerial photography rig and uses the photographs to document, among other things, which bike lanes he finds effective and which intersections still need work. In the photo above, Neil can be seen as a tiny dark blue figure in the sand to the left of the bridge on the far side of the river. You can even see the faint line of the kite’s string. Even cooler, the red and white object halfway across the bridge is his friend Ted, who had seen his kite line and biked over to say “hi.”
Unlike airplane based aerial photography, Neil’s is quiet, cheap, beautiful, and non-polluting. Now that’s community.
