Go fly a kite, with an iPhone attached to its string

I'm a big fan of the webcomic xkcd for many reasons, but recently I found another reason to like it. A while back, the artist, Randall Munroe, rigged a bare-bones camera to take a photo every 13 seconds as it hung suspended from a kite string. His photos over Boston rekindled in me something that has long been a dream of mine: to take photos from places extremely high (lip of a volcano, International Space Station) and extremely low (ocean floor, in a cave). The most cost-effective extremely-high option, of course, is kite aerial photography, an on-again, off-again fascination with a very devoted fan base. So, I bought a $40 kite from REI that could handle winds strong enough to lift my iPhone 4S part way up to the clouds. I used SmugMug's Camera Awesome! app to set an interval of 30 seconds (for the first flight) and 10 seconds (for the second and third flights), I looped the kite string around my phone and through multiple holes in the case, and I let 'er fly.

I posted a photo on Instagram, and I'm already getting suggestions for the next cool thing to fly. My favorite, from Pat Lovell, is a remote controlled helicopter, which could lift my D300 with a rigging around it. Or, it could also lift a GoPro HD HERO2 that I just bought. We'll see!

Also, here are all 65 photos from the three kite photo flights. Warning: there's a lot of distortion and a lot of ground. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty.