Back in May we visited the atoll of Manihi in French Polynesia. It was our first Tuamotu atoll and we really loved visiting there. We took out our special kite aerial photography equipment and walked down one street of the village near the pass. It was a wonderful experience because the local village kids were very curious and we let them help us bring down the kite (read more about that day). As we’ve done before with Petite Tabac and BBQ Island, I uploaded the photos to my friend Stewart Long of GonzoEarth who worked long and hard to process and stitch the many photos together. Then we sent them to Google, and thanks to our partnership with Google, they put the photos into Google Earth 
and Google Maps:
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Due to the sun getting low in the sky, we weren’t able to cover a large part of the village. We were also flying the kite low, which allowed us to get very high resolution photos – if you zoom in you can see they are much better than the satellite photos for the rest of the island. Our photos are the darker higher resolution ones on the north side of the village. Special thanks to Jason and Lara, Tahina’s crew at the time, for helping fly the kite while I took the pictures. There were telephone/electric poles and wires and trees in the village, so we had to avoid getting the kite string caught in those. That’s why there are some gaps as we walked up the street. Watch the slideshow in the post about BBQ Island for pictures of how we do the aerial photos. Watch the slideshow below for more photos showing the entire Manihi village from the air, and pictures of the kids who helped us.
