Patuxent Panorama

In the final weekend of October, we finally had some good weather for KAP after weeks where the weather and my schedule didn’t line up. I had a new location in mind: Flag Ponds Nature Park in Calvert County, which has a beach featuring some small cliffs and a pier that I was thinking of using as the subject. However, when I arrived there, the park was closed despite it being during the usual open hours. Forced to improvise, I decided to head to Jefferson Patterson Park, a nearby location along the Patuxent River.

Jefferson Patterson Park is a pretty nice place; it has lots of open space, walking paths, the waterfront, a museum, and historical displays. There’s no really interesting landmark that I could find, though, so I walked to an open field near the water and decided to just fly the kite high to take some pictures of the shoreline with its fall colors now in full display. Here are a few pictures I took during the walk out to the flying field.

The wind at the field was just about perfect; about 10 mph and fairly steady. I set up my workhorse Rokker KAP kite and had it up in the air in no time. I decided to try something new and record a vlog of my KAP session this time. Here it is below, and you can also find it and any future ones I do in the new vlogs section of this website.

The sky conditions were changing quickly during the KAP session, with predominantly overcast skies periodically giving way to to a few minutes of sunshine at a time. As a result, I got some nicely-lit pictures of the shoreline also featuring moody clouds. The best looking photos were towards the north, away from the sun. There were even a couple instances during the many rotations of my autoKAP rig where the wind was smooth enough to stitch panoramas from the resulting photos, which are taken in 5-second intervals each separated by a rotation of about 15 degrees. I’ve put the best one first in the gallery below and also as the cover photo at the top of this blog post. This panorama was stitched from two images (actually not consecutive ones; the horizon was too tilted in the middle of three) using a program called Hugin. A few other aerial views of the park are also included in the gallery.

The wind picked up during the flight, which made getting the kite back down hard work. It wasn’t that the wind was too strong, but with the bridle set up for the lighter winds at the beginning of the session, a lot of force was required to pull it down. That’s okay, because I could use the exercise! It was a very enjoyable and successful KAP session, even though I had to improvise on the location. I’m sure I’ll get a chance to fly at Flag Ponds Nature Park at some point in the future. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the photos and video!