I loved this article in the first issue of MAKE!
Once you have panning and tilting capabilities how are you going to know what you are looking at? I would think that an LCD screen of some sort would be needed. Otherwise you would have to lower the kite to see what pictures you took and then you could make aiming adjustments on the ground.
what kind of camera are you using? how hard would it be to solder in some wires and a momentary Push button (normally open) switch? I can see a servo closing a clamp that hits a bigger pushbutton switch. I think you are right that the servo may have a hard time hitting the button on the camera as it is.
home some of this helps!
I really like the idea of a bright orange stick to show where the camera is pointing.
I am not sure how possible this is to build but I would imagine putting the camera on a lazy susan type platform. Essentially two lightweight platforms with a ball bearing sandwiched in the middle. This platform could have notches along the circumference like a big gear. The servo would also have a gear on it and the two "gears" could mesh together.
Run the servo motor one way and pan to the left, reverse the motor to pan to the right. You could also take this idea from the horizontal to the vertical and that would allow you to aim the camera up and down. I am not sure how you could put those two ideas together.
Does the camera you plan to use have the ability to turn off the auto focus? In the digital cameras I have owned the shutter button needs to be depressed half way in order to focus the camera. This would be a problem on a kite rig.
I have an idea about how to use some sort of servo to depress the shutter button but I will have to draw you a crude picture because i can not put it into words.
i just saw this picture on the new http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/images/3rig2.jpg
notice that there is a servo mounted to the top of the camera with a popcicle stick acting as a finger.
it seems like it is all about weight.