You’ve likely seen those depictions of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite with a key attached to experiment with electricity. Now, imagine that’s Evan Reinheimer, except he’s got a camera attached to his kite string to take aerial photographs on Long Island and around the world.

"I just had this thought one day, ‘Wow, I bet I could use a kite to get my camera up into the sky,’" Reinheimer says. He launched a digital camera with a timer for the first time at Robert Moses State Park as a college student in the early 2000s, snapping random photographs at intervals. "I would send it back up over and over again until I had the photo I wanted," he says.

Reinheimer's experiments on the beach led to a full time career in the niche field of kite aerial photography, bringing the former Babylon resident, now 41 and living in Boca Raton, Florida, back to Long Island art festivals each summer. He has refined his craft, often referred to as KAP, so he can now see what the camera sees, and aim and operate it by remote control from the ground.

In addition to photographs of Long Island beaches and lighthouses, he has captured beach huts in Cape Town, South Africa, the Colosseum in Rome and the Egyptian pyramids in Giza. He’ll be exhibiting Aug. 15-17 at the Montauk Art Show on the Green and Aug. 30-31 at the Westhampton Beach Festival of the Arts. Reinheimer also volunteers on the Montauk Art Show Association's art show committee.

"We see 99% of photographs from 5½ feet off the ground. It’s a very boring viewpoint for me because it’s where I spend my whole life," Reinheimer says. "What I’m looking for is that space above the ground, but below where an aircraft flies that we don’t see photographs from very often." With a kite he can also reach places where drones are restricted, he says.

Kite aerial photography is uncommon, Reinheimer says, and photographers on Long Island agree. "It is rare," says Carol DiRenzo, of East Yaphank. She's president of the Photographic Federation of Long Island, an umbrella group of 16 photography clubs from Nassau and Suffolk counties and New York City. Says David Wollin, president of the Port Washington-based Photography Club of Long Island: "I’ve heard of it. I don’t know anybody who does it."

Reinheimer initially thought he had invented KAP, imagining it had never been done before, he says. He later learned that as far back as the late 1880s, a French photographer used the technique and that an American photographer employed it to document the damage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A small community of kite aerial photographers exists online, and Reinheimer thinks he may be the only KAP enthusiast making a living by selling photographs. He primarily sells them at art festivals nationwide for between $50 for a small, unframed print to as much as $12,000 for a 12-foot-wide triptych.

Reinheimer plans his photos, drawing them out on paper. Then he studies the weather, wind and lighting conditions in the locations he plans to visit to choose the right time of year to go. Even then, he sometimes has to wait weeks if the weather is cloudy or rainy, for instance.

His kite goes up to about 100 feet before he clips the camera to the string, secured in place by a bracket. Then he lets out more line. His least expensive kite costs about $80; his most expensive one was custom-made for close to $1,000, he says. He chooses very stable kites. "They look like they’re up there with a thumbtack in the sky," he says. When he’s finished, he carefully reels the line back in.

Even before Reinheimer was born, his mother had decorated his nursery with kites. "It probably did make some kind of imprint on my brain that kites were neat and interesting and cool," Reinheimer says.

The first time he flew a kite was in Montauk with his grandfather, Gil Hanse, who was the mayor of Babylon for decades and also town supervisor. "He bought a kite for myself and my cousins out at the old White’s general store in Montauk and we flew it out on the beach," Reinheimer says.

His photography goes back a long way as well. "My mom and dad gave me a little 110 camera when I was about 3 years old," Reinheimer says. "I would sometimes set up my stuffed animals in my room and take photographs of them. It was interesting to me that I could press a button and then have what was in front of the camera in a printed form. I was a little kid; this was probably blowing my mind."

Fast forward to college: "I had no direction ... no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up," Reinheimer says. He took a photography class at Suffolk County Community College and "that was just it for me," he says. Necessity became the mother of invention — he was interested in aerial photography but couldn’t afford to hire an airplane or a helicopter. Drones were not yet available.

The No. 1 question Reinheimer gets asked now: "Why don’t you use a drone?"

"It’s a lot more fun to use a kite would be the simplest answer," he says.

But there are practical reasons.

Drones are fantastic for video, but not so much for still images, Reinheimer says. The photos he sells are blown up to 8 feet wide and 12 feet wide. "Once you blow up to that size, the quality really degrades," he says. With a kite he can launch a heavier, higher-quality camera that takes better still images, he adds.

He can also fly in more places than a drone because, as opposed to drones, there are very few regulations against kites, he says.

And, kites are embraced by the public, he says.

Reinheimer’s sister, Emily, 38, of Brookhaven hamlet, has traveled with her brother to assist him on shoots in Egypt and Europe. "Anywhere he goes, he kind of attracts a crowd. There are always people who gather around. People are fascinated by the kites," she says.

Reinheimer agrees. "I’m always met with intrigue and curiosity and, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen that before.’ A lot of times, especially lately, drones are met with suspicion and uneasiness and sometimes a creepiness. There is that ‘Oh, what are they spying on’ aspect that goes along with that," he says.

But never say never, Reinheimer says. Now that he is married to Katie Ward, 39, who is also originally from Long Island — Lake Grove, to be exact — and they have a toddler, Milo, 2, Reinheimer says he may try to use drones to speed up the photography process.

But for now, he’s sticking with kites — his next trip is planned for either France in the early fall or Hong Kong in November.