Fog and smoke filled the sky, which was featureless. The cloud ceiling was at 700 feet, and balloons need 2,000 feet to get clearance to launch. As a result, we got a purple sky at sunrise with balloons firing up, some tethered balloon for the kids, and that was about it. Still, I went around, taking shots of everything, hoping to catch one of those 'ah-ha moments', and I think I learned a few lessons which are hopefully worth sharing.
Lesson 0: Backup Religion and recovering files from a CF card
Normally, I'm atypically good (per human norms) with backing up data. Data goes from card to laptop, and from laptop to usb drive, and eventually to a NAS with a raid 1 to have multiply redundant storage for photos. This time, I forgot my usb drive at home -- so I copied everything to the laptop, and started processing at the end of the trip.
Two days later, my laptop's hard drive died. My.. four month old.. laptop.
The lesson is: If you care about your photos, be religious about having at least two copies of them at any one time. If you're really serious, you can start to worry about site-based redundancy (what if there's a fire? or an earthquake?), or you can calculate the mean time to failure of all the spinning disks in your life, and then try to guess how many copies you need before catastrophic loss in your lifetime is unlikely.
I got lucky -- I shoot with three CF cards, a Sandisk 16gb and 8gb, and a Transcend 32 gb. I hadn't deleted the stuff I shot on the 32 gb card, so I mainly had photos taken on the 16gb card. The bad news was, I'd deleted everything on that card, and was halfway through it, taking photos of friends up in San Francisco. The better news is that CF cards just seem to be running a Fat 32 file system -- very widely used, and very easy to recover from if the files weren't actually overwritten. I used a tool called PhotoRec, which is open source, only 23% cryptic (my mom couldn't use it, but any high school kid today could), and worked flawlessly.
Lesson 1: Don't be afraid to fiddle with that exposure compensation
This is a bit of a 'Let go, Luke!' thing for me, that I've only really come to appreciate in the last few months. I think it's true that most modern cameras are so good at exposures that you generally only have to decide if you want to spot or matrix meter. At least, for 90% of the photos you take, that's the case. And, for the really low light stuff, I would always manually meter, and it'd work out fine (modulo chimping).
But I find that having the ability to have the camera meter for you, then offset it just a nudge does really come in handy. This is obvious advice if you're an expert (or just plain not clueless), but it took a bit for me to realize it. Watching balloons launch in the early morning light, I found there were two things going on:
- Fire from the balloon
- Ambient light bouncing off the low-hanging clouds from the not-yet risen sun.
Spot metering on the sky made the sky too bright, and left the fire uninteresting.
Spot metering on the fire made everything else way too dark (the fire is bright).
Matrix metering still made everything too bright (mainly picking up the 'big sky').
The best compromise I could find was too take the results from the matrix metering, and dial it down -.7 - 2 stops. That gave me something a lot closer to what I was looking for -- purple-deep blue skies, and some detail in the flame-lit areas underneath the balloon.
Lesson 2: Always shoot the reaction
I think of this as a "Joe McNally" lesson. I read this passage from him where he described his time shooting for Sports Illustrated: He'd go to cover a horse race, and end up shooting a circle of people betting in some dark alley.
The part that made this lesson easy was that the balloon show actually had a lot of people really excited about balloons, and willing to do the really immense amount of work needed to get one up in the air. The part that made this lesson hard is that I find it pretty difficult to photograph strangers. It feels vaguely invasive, and I think, "Oh god, I'm the creepy guy with a camera", and of course, if kids are around, I sit around thinking that someone's 7', 300 lb father is going to beat me to a pulp, or (worse) start breaking glass. I don't have a good answer for this part yet, but when I need to, I just force these feelings down and take the picture. I'm not going to say here is "it helps to not have a conscience", but maybe it helps to just think of it as what it is -- photons getting counted on a tiny little piece of silicon.
Lesson 3: Always take your angle where you can get it
One of my first odd experiences with my SLR was on Hamilton Island, this little but surprisingly touristy island on the Great Barrier Reef. I was at the highest point on the island, ready to take a picture of a gorgeous sunset vista over some Australian sea, and the sky had turned into featureless gray mush. Behind me, a limo rolled up, and a bride & groom get out, and behind them, a shabbier car shows up with their photog. He has them pose, do their thing, then he sprawls down on the ground, in nice vest and cumberbund, and shoots up at them.. because it worked!
Sitting back and watching all the tethered balloons rise, I realized I wasn't getting the angle I wanted. I wanted to be up and under, to get what I affectionately thought of as the 'math textbook cover look' (which always have balloons -- somebody explain why?). So, I threw myself on the slightly damp grass, and started shooting up and over, and I got more than I bargained for:
The sky was basically white/gray fog here, so I metered on the balloon. That seemed sort of 'blah' though, and it seemed to be blowing out the balloon a little (maybe reflected light from the fog?), so I dropped it by about -.7 on camera. That darkened the balloon a fair amount, but not super shadowy. It also was just about enough to still blow out the sky, which already had almost no detail, into being very close to pure white -- leaving me with a balloon drifting in a white sky. In post, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't darker (I wanted more detail on the orange fire). I bumped up the blacks and fiddled with the exposure, and this popped out. For me, this was the best photo of the trip -- just out of control colors, and this wild, pop off the page balloon soaring away into nothingness.
So, don't be afraid to roll around on the ground.
*
I really was bummed that there was no balloon launch. My research on Flickr indicated that you could get amazing shots if you slapped on a polarizer, and composed a swarm of balloons in the sky just right, but it was not to be. Still, every trip I take like this, I feel like I learn stuff, and that's what this post is hopefully about. :)
Relevant links:
My complete gallery of keepers from the balloon festival.
Mike's gallery from the same event.
Some amazing shots people on Flickr got (or have gotten in previous years);
http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitaltrav/193810099/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitaltrav/195550847/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiicytuna/190320676/
Gear primarily used in taking balloon shots:
- Nikon d300
Comment: The excellent ISO 1600 helped me get enough shutter-speed pre-dawn to get some interesting shots. Also, it's my baby.
- Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8
Comment: You're going to want to go wide with balloons, because they're big. You also want it if all those balloons go up in the sky, so you can get a constellation of them floating around. It also helped me get more light in early morning -- it's plenty sharp at f/2.8, and I was shooting before sunrise with lots of people moving around. Mind the distortion at the edges though.
- Nikon 70-300mm VR f/4.5-5.6
Comment: You're going to want to zoom in on balloons high up in the air (which didn't happen), but you're also going to want to see detail with what's happening with the balloon crew, and to shoot the crowd to get reactions.
- Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8
Comment: Once the tethered balloons lifted off, I used this to capture individual balloons 40' or so up. It has better controlled distortion than my wide angles, and the perspective is more suited to the balloons up in the air but low, and I always love the image quality on this lens.
- Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 D
Comment: Used to shoot some portraits of people in the crowd. Most of those were lost when the laptop died and went to heaven, but using this lens wasn't strictly 'necessary' -- it's just arguably my favorite lens, and nothing beats it for shots of people's faces. Also, it's laser sharp -- just gotta control that depth of field when you shoot at 1.4.
- Gitzo 1540T Tripod
Comment: Very useful in the pre-dawn shots of the balloons. Probably would have been useful if I were shooting some amazing shot of all the balloons in the air that I wanted amazing sharpness on. Once the sun was up (albeit behind clouds), I didn't use it -- just folded it away (yay for Carbon Fiber).
- Adobe Lightroom 2 (beta)
Comment: I do 99% of my photo processing here. A little pokey at times, but I like it.
What would have helped:
Something like the d3 or the d700 would have given me 2-3 more stops of ISO in early morning, meaning movement of the crew would have been crisp. As it was, I was hovering around 1/15-1/40th -- wanted just a bit more.
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