I recently had one of my students taking my online class with the BPSOP send me her photos for my video critique. She had gone to a hot air balloon launch consisting of balloons from several local clubs. She told me that she was very naive to think that she could just wander around among the balloons as they were being inflated and taking off.
It didn’t take long for her to discover that she was not going to be permitted to just wander around. The first reason was because (as she put it) people were frantically running around trying to get their balloons in the air as close to sunrise as they could. The second reason, was for security, and the third most obvious reason was for liability. As a result she was keeped off the field and even with her telephoto lens the balloons were small in her frame. She was very dissapointed but as I told her a valuable lesson was learned.
In an event like that or any event where there’s mulitple things going on i.e., car races, horse racing, certain marathons, air shows, etc. I say airshows because I also had a student taking my“Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops show me some of his photos of an airshow he had recently attended. The airplanes in his pictures were so small, they could have passed for minuature hummingbirds!!
So what do you do? You have to factor in the worst case scenario. You have to be smart and figure (especially in this current age) that you’re not going to be able to get close to your subjects for the reasons I stated above. Do your homework enough ahead of time so the powers that be can make a decision and hand it down the proverbial chain of command.
In the case of the woman in my online class, I suggested that next time well before the day of the hot air balloon launch, she contact some or if necessary all of the clubs. I told her to ask permission to be up close and personal and in exchange give them copies of all the photos she took. Maybe it would work and maybe not; but it never hurts to ask.
In the photo above, I found out about the club’s launch and contacted the president several days before. He agreed to let me take photos, so I met him there well before sunrise as they were beginning to take their equipment out of their van. I used my Sunpath program and my Morin 2000 hand bearing compass to determine (to the degree) where the sun was going to rise.
I wanted to backlight the balloon (so it would glow) being inflated, so I had them lay it out in a straight line aiming it right at where the sun was going to hit the horizon. As it was being inflated I took off my shoes and stood inside it, and as a result got a pretty damn good shot. The silhouettes you see are actually two people had stand there to add some scale to the image.
Visit my website at: www.joebarabab.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.
JoeB
