This was my first kite festival so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  My only assumption was there were going to be lots of kites.  I was right about that.

Most of the kites at the festival were of the “common” variety.  I expected to see more exhibition-quality kites, but the scale of the experience was still amazing.  There were hundreds of kites in the warm autumn sky with a backdrop of a beautiful early sunset.

A few observations:

When you think of a kite festival it usually brings to mind lots of kites in the sky, but the reality of flying lots of kites simultaneously means there is LOTS of tangled string.  I was constantly tripping over string on the ground and got clothes-lined a couple times with airborne string.  Nothing disastrous, but I witnessed a couple people go down in a heap after tripping.  The crowd was an interesting subject to photograph along with the kites.

There were a couple huge kites that were very impressive to watch.  It took a whole team of people to launch it.  When it landed the crowd scattered quickly.  There was a decent breeze, but the larger kites struggled to get any significant altitude.

The most impressive kite was a 2D replica of a Boeing 747.  It was huge – about 30 feet from tip-to-tip.  Apparently it was heavy too because I never saw it more than 20 feet off the ground.

Shooting into the sun presented some technical challenges.  Most of these images have been processed with a slight HDR treatment to adjust the contrast levels and pull some detail out of the shadows.  There was also some significant white balance corrections that had to be made.