Double KAP Rig Session / Canon G11 with CHDK

I picked up a Canon G11 yesterday to help test out the newly ported CHDK. The benefits of the G11 to the G9 is a bigger image sensor and better image stabilization. The megapixels for this camera are lower than the G9, but it's nice that Canon finally put efforts into image improvement versus trying to appease customers who think that more MP's are better.

I couldn't wait to try it out, so I ventured to nearby Silver Lake in Wisconsin on a cloudy, foggy, and gloomy day. It was pretty wet, but I decided to go for it anyway. I also wanted to try the G11 on the gyro stabilized kite rig, and decided to mount a secondary camera to the line to capture video of the down-line kite rig. I used my GoPro HD Hero for the video, and used my simple Picavet from Brooxes.com. The GoPro was 170º at the 60fps 720p setting I was using. In the future, I will be overlapping the Picavet connections to the kiteline, and also using the full 1080p recording setting, as it captures at 127º. Here is the 2 cameras on the kite line, showing the FlowForm 16 kite up in the wind.



I cannot begin to judge the images captured from the G11 yet, as the conditions were less than ideal. I do like the swivel LCD screen more than I expected, as I now have the battery-saving option of closing the screen to extend the life of the session. Here are a few images of the snow and ice from this morning's session.







Here is the video from the HD Hero. Please keep in mind that this is played in real time with no image stabilization, and was used to see how the GS-1 Gyro servos performed on the lower KAP rig. Normally, if my goal was to capture video, I would use the Stabilized rig to reduce the jitters.

Click the image below to link to the Kite video...


Additional images from this session can be found here.