My Impetus

This past weekend I attended the 2007 Quick Chek New Jersey Festival of Ballooning at Solberg Airport in Readington, NJ. I was really looking forward to this event, and had scoped it out a few weeks ago. The 25th Annual Festival took place July 27th – 29th (Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday) and they were expecting 175,000 people! As I was poking around on their site, I stumbled across a media section. Turns out they were opening the event to the Press and to amateur photographers at 6:30am Friday morning. This would allow me to walk around the balloon launch area and I couldn’t wait for this day to come. Unfortunately, there were overcast skies and it was quite grey out, but I still had a phenomenal time.

I arrived at the airport at 6am and began walking over to the large central tent. Inside, a group of people were listening to the weather events of the past few hours and the forecast for the next few. No signs of wind or rain, but the cloud cover wasn’t going anywhere. Around 6:30 am I saw the first balloon begin to inflate.

I had borrowed a friends wide angle lens, a Sigma AF 10-20mm f/4-5.6 HSM EX DC and I was excited to try it out! Having not used a wide angle lens prior to this event, I was quite startled and impressed by the field of view. I was getting very used to my 70-200mm telephoto lens, so much so that when I first looked through the viewfinder of the 10-20mm I had to look twice! The 10mm image is quite interesting. It really captures a wide field of view and you must be mindful of what is creeping into the image sensor. With the XTi and the 1.6x crop factor, it is similar to a 16mm lens on a 35mm body.
The lens showed some distortion at 10mm. As you can see from this image people tend to look very thin and stretched at the corners, and the balloons all seem to curl into the center. This shot was taken from the ground a few feet back from the basket of the hot air balloon. Have I mentioned how interesting the wide angle lens perspective is! All in all, I really liked this lens, but I don’t think I will purchase one quite this wide. Ideally, I would like a 15-70mm, and the closest is a toss up between the EF-S 17-55mm, the EF 17-40mm, or the EF 24-70mm. There are some interesting feaure differences between the three lenses…but I digress.

Decisions….decisions….

For most of the morning, I was shooting from the ground, looking straight at balloons. At one point, a crew was filling the balloon and they were getting ready to start the ignition process to fill the balloon with hot air, and allow it to start rising. I asked the crew chief if he would mind if I got near as he did it, and he offered to let me into the basket as the balloon rose and the basket came off of the ground! This was a very cool perspective and I was appreciative to the crew chief for this opportunity. After a few spurts of liquid propane, the balloon started to rise and the basket lifted slightly off of the ground. Way cool! My first time in a hot air balloon basket!

I continued to wander around, taking pictures of Mr. Peanut and the Energizer bunny. I wandered over to the ReMAX balloon, and asked the pilot, Bob, if he would mind if I got underneath the basket on a tethered ascent and shoot straight up. He said no problem, and I got a nice couple of captures from directly below the basket. I then started talking with a member of their crew. I asked her if she thought Bob would take me up, and she smiled at me, looked up at Bob, and I think he knew my intentions. A minute later, as he was coming down, he pointed to me, and said, “Ready?” I most certainly was!

In order to keep the weight of the balloon consistent, I had to hop into the basket before the previous passenger got out. It was a bit cramped for a minute with me, my backpack, the pilot, 3 liquid propane tanks, and another passenger. However, they could have squeezed me into anything as long as I was going to get a ride! The other passenger hopped out, and Bob told me to hang on and we began chatting. Really nice guy. Been doing this for over 20 years, and he really liked his work. I was able to take some interesting pictures from about 50 feet in the air. I really liked the look of this eagle from the air. I had attempted a few shots from the ground, but the angle of its head and bill made it difficult. The view was spectacular! I could only imagine how cool it would be to take an actual balloon ride! Only 360 days till next years Balloon Festival!! The collection of photos, consisting of two sets are posted on my flickr! account.

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