Before drones were widely available, I attached an inexpensive camera to a kite to take some aerial photographs. I'm a little surprised that wasn't more common, given how popular drones are now.
Perhaps the limiting factor was the lack of inexpensive cameras, not the lack of drones. There was only a short window of time between when remotely controllable lightweight cameras became cheap enough for people to not worry about crashing them into rocks, on the one hand, and when drones became widely available, on the other.
Agreed. We got around this by hacking the single use CVS/Rite Aid cameras according to the below guide. Dropping one of these in the water or on some rocks didn't feel quite so devastating.
Not that narrow. I remember in the late 80's / early 90's Estes had a model rocket that would pop a picture (onto film) from the nosecone when the chute charge went off. I have no idea what the quality was like (my parents refused to buy me one).
I spent a bunch of allowance money on one of those. It used 110 film cartridges, and had a pretty cheap plastic lens. Quality wasn't really that good (and wasn't helped by the cheap film I had to use), but it didn't matter to a 10 year old -- I had a rocket that took pictures!
The stability of that kind of platform is a severely limiting factor. The 3-axis gimbal had a lot to do with making aerial photography a thing as much as the drone itself. I was part of a group where we launched a helium balloon to ~90,000' with 2 GoPros attached. The footage is so unstable in much the same way that I imagine being attached to a kite would be. The weight of the camera is at the end of a length of "string" which essentially makes it a pendulum. It just swings and swings and swings. Oh, and it also spins as it twists up the tension in the string, and then releases to spin back the other way. Just about the time all of the swinging and spinning relaxes, the balloon reaches max altitude and bursts.
That looks interesting for other purposes I'd like to try. I love builds that let gravity do the work.
I have been wanting to try it again using a swivel in the line to allow the balloon to spin freely, but then use a tail/fin type of attachment to keep the rig oriented. It seems like anything would have to make it better.
Kite photography is still used at some archaeological sites for aerial photographs: some countries, particularly in the Middle East, are wary of people using drones with cameras.
One of the lectures on YouTube from the Oriental Institute had beautiful pictures of early (Old Kingdom?) Egyptian military and trading sites on the Nile in southern Egypt or possibly northern Sudan, and described the problems they had and why they used kites.
