A LED flashlight powered by a battery made using five pennies.

Oops! Are we gonna get in trouble? In order to make our Five-Cent LED Battery we needed to sand the faces off 4 pennies. According to United States Code, TITLE 18, PART I, CHAPTER 17, § 331. Mutilation, diminution, and falsification of coins:

"Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Gulp! Fraudulently? I don’t think we did it "Fraudulently." (Ahem) And I just want to say for the record that we did not force anyone to deface currency of the United States. In fact, if pushed came to shove I will say that we discouraged the practice and in fact actually pleaded with everyone at the Exploratorium, hoodlums that they are, to come up with another means of making a Five-Cent battery. But they brazenly went forward, stopping only briefly to maniacally cackle and call me names like "Goody Two-shoes" and thumb their noses at me. Needless to say they shamelessly went ahead with their outlaw ways. Oh, they are bad to the bone! We were as innocent as you all out there. I tried to stop them! That's what I will say! That or I’ll say that the "pennies" we were using were actually fake "prop" pennies that we got at the local novelty shop. Either way, you can't prove anything!

Now, if you don't want to risk being outside the laws of the United States, the Exploratorium has put together quite a fun project list of fun things to do and make. To the best of my knowledge, the majority of them won't get you in trouble with the authorities. They can teach you things like how to make musical instruments out of normal household junk, how to make a bottle blast off or how to build a motorized toy that dances, using a recycled CD and a DC motor. Really cool stuff!

Be good out there and stay out of trouble.

Watch the Quest Lab: The Five-cent Battery television story online.

Cris Benton inspects his kite aerial photography rig
before sending it up in the sky. Credit: Jane Liaw.

UC Berkeley architecture professor Charles 'Cris' Benton is a kite aerial photography (KAP) enthusiast. Benton is well-known in the KAP world for sharing his knowledge and love of the art.

In this art form, a camera is carried aloft by a kite and operated remotely from the ground. The pictures taken provide a bird's-eye view that can’t be seen from the ground or an airplane. Benton's Web site, chock full of information and gorgeous photos, has attracted numerous newbies to KAP.

I am profiling Benton for the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program. As I was casting around for an interesting scientist to write about, Benton stood out to me. He has a distinct and coherent philosophy that extends through both work and hobby.

Benton explains his attraction to KAP on the Web site:

Kite aerial photography appeals to that part of me, perhaps of all of us, that would slip our earthly bonds and see the world from new heights. An aerial view offers a fresh perspective of familiar landscapes and in doing so challenges our spatial sensibilities, our grasp of relationships.

KAP is a natural fit for Benton, who says architects also think about bird's-eye perspectives and relationships between buildings in the landscape.

KAP was invented more than a century ago, but fell out of favor as military and commercial photography from airplanes became popular. In past few decades, artists interested in a unique perspective from the sky have revived the art. Today, thousands of people worldwide pursue KAP, and Benton is one respected example. He builds the rigs that hold his camera aloft from parts he finds around the house. The camera cradle, for instance, is re-purposed from an old computer hard drive. Benton, who took his first aerial photographs at Cesar Chavez Park in 1995, has built every rig himself; he's now on his tenth.

Benton's creation is impressive. He has set a camera in a wooden frame, and engineered a remote mechanism that pushes the shutter button and can move his camera to vertical or horizontal positions. To take his aerial photos, he handles the spool of kite string with one hand and works the radio controller that remotely manipulates the camera with the other.

At Cesar Chavez Park today, I watch as Benton hooks the kite to a park bench after it's aloft, then attaches the camera to the kite line, rigged in a pulley system that allows Benton to move the camera up and down the line. He snaps a few photos of himself at different heights to show me.

Benton peers up at his rig as he positions it for some
photo-taking. Credit: Jane Liaw.
Benton doesn't use real-time video to help compose his shots, as some kite aerial photographers do. With video, the photographer on the ground sees exactly what the camera's shot will look like. Instead, Benton "interrogates the landscape." He thinks through the shot, forms a hypothesis on what he might see if he were looking through the camera lens in the sky, takes the picture, and compares his imaginings to the actual shot.

Benton has in recent years developed a fascination with the south San Francisco Bay. For several years, he has been documenting the area as part of the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Hidden Ecologies project. Benton takes kite aerial photographs of the South Bay salt flats and other Bay geographies, while a microbiologist takes "microcinematography"– photos of tiny critters such as bacteria and diatoms that inhabit these ecosystems, captured with the help of field microscopes.

Benton has published his photos on a blog: majestic overviews of the South Bay salt ponds that run the color spectrum from red to green to pink, depending on how the microscopic organisms adapt to varying salinity levels.

Cris will be collaborating with KQED staff on our next 2-minute "Your Photos on QUEST" segment for broadcast and web distribution. It will air on August 26, 2008.

His stunning set of Kite Aerial Photography of South San Francisco Bay did a wonderful job of expressing a sense of locale, with a passion for nature, via a process that captures something unexpected and essential.

In his own words:

"…juxtapositions abound – dendritic marsh channels as foils for the straight lines of infrastructure; wild openness confronting the confines of encroaching capitalism; salt ponds, vividly colored by the aforementioned halophiles, constrained by subtly hued mud and marsh; derelict, forgotten engineering works faintly echoing their former functions. ."

Benton makes his own kite rigs, but if you're interested in taking up the hobby and are daunted by putting together your own equipment, you can also buy ready-made rigs online from Brooks Leffler, a pioneer of modern KAP.