Arizona Treks

A few years ago I went on a kick of going north to the Lake Pleasant area to photograph hot air balloons.  It was a real kick but after a while I lost interest.  This was all done with a DSLR and some of the photos were pretty good.  

Recently I have been hankering to get out and shoot hot air balloons with large format cameras.  Last night I finally did it.  Rather than using the 4X5 which I am much faster with and know the lenses better I decided to use the 8X10.  Well, not saying it was a disaster but it did not work out so very well.

They set up pretty quickly, constant motion so blurs are going to happen.  Once the balloon is upright it begins moving and you gotta work fast.  With a small format camera that is much easier but with large format it is quite a challenge.

Of course, I realized that it would be very challenging and did not expect to get any useable photos from it.  What I expected was to learn a little of what is necessary to shoot them with a large format camera.  Some of the things I learned are:

Setup speed is critical, anticipate the shot and prepare for it in advance.  But the preparations should not include stopping down or inserting the film holder.  This is because the scene is changing and sometimes the changes are not what you expect so by leaving the aperture open and the film holder out you can reframe more quickly.  I am much faster with the 4X5 but wanted to use the 8X10 to create a bigger challenge, and in that I was successful beyond my wildest dreams.

Shutter speed is very important.  To avoid blur, the shutter needs to be as fast as practical.  Those 1/2 second shutter speeds are to be avoided.  After a couple of exposures I set up in the back of my truck to get further off the ground and thus have less ground in the foreground (without using front rise).  This helped keep the aperture a little wider.  Select more narrow DOF where possible. I only took ISO 100 film but quickly realized I should have taken ISO 400.

I hope to try this again in the near future and hopefully have some photos to share next time. 

These photos are from several years ago using a DSLR.