From my experience in flying kites it is important for your safety to wear gloves whenever you fly kites. Especially when you fly the huge and has lots of pull-power type of kites used for kite aerial photography.
I personally regret not wearing them when I started flying kites. I was flying a 7-foot wide Delta kite back then, the wind was good, then it suddenly it pulled hard really quick. And I got a chunk of skin burned out by the kite line. Lesson wear gloves. You can never be certain of the wind.
And even if you can be certain I found out that flying with a glove on one hand is a lot easier than flying with no gloves at all. Because with a glove in one hand you can allow the kite line slide to that hand when releasing kite lines, while the other hand holds the reel. And depending on the glove your using it can provide more grip when pulling the kite down.
My choice of glove is a leather glove. I have tried a couple of gloves before. I tried a cotton glove, which was actually good, because it allowed air though and did not make my sweaty. It also had a good grip even better than the leather glove. But the down side was that it gets worn out and torn by the kite line very quickly. I also tried a cotton with leather glove which was no good because it was so thin that you can still feel the heat cause by the kite line and feel the pain. So I'm sticking to my leather glove because its just the right thickness and as far as we've worked together, has never let me down.
So there use a glove.
The Kite Aerial Photography Project seen here, is part of Gerome Soriano’s project to produce and compile a book of kite aerial photographs of the Philippines. It is supported by the Kite Association of the Philippines, the Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation, Inc and sponsored by Sony and Sony Alpha Philippines.
