Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta

Posted on 25 October, 2010 by Eric

The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta takes place every October, the first full week of the month (Saturday of one weekend through Sunday the next). I’ve now had time to sort through the shots I took from this year’s Fiesta, so I thought it’d be a good time to write down some thoughts / advice on how to photograph the event. I’ll talk about logistics in this post, and follow up in a few days with some gear recommendations.

According to a number of estimates, the Fiesta is the most photographed single event on the planet. And it’s easy to see why — admission is open and reasonably priced, you’ve got lots of color to work with, skies are usually blue. And with the advent of the internet, you can get your ticket(s) online in advance. Piece of cake.

But all this comes with one little complication — the Fiesta can be a crowded place.

To put it in perspective — the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico has a population of a bit over 500,000. The last estimate I saw pegs the visitor count for this year’s Fiesta at about 750,000. I suspect this double- and triple-counts people that come to town and attend multiple days’ launches. But still, on weekend days you’re out on a field with well over 100,000 other pedestrians.

Did I mention that if you don’t have any in-town relatives, you need to line up a hotel room well in advance for this?

Anyway, the crowd is friendly, but it’s no place for the claustrophobic. Since you’ll be viewing the balloons from the same field they’re launching from (on weekend mornings, about 600 balloons launch in multiple waves as part of “mass ascensions”), you need to be ready to do some walking — if only to get out of the way of the next wave of balloons as they are brought in by trailer.

Also, as you might imagine, getting 100,000+ people in and out of a single large field is no mean feat. There are only so many ways you can get to the park where the Fiesta launches — so driving definitely isn’t recommended. Instead, when you buy your ticket(s), get the kind that include a shuttle-bus ride. Here, you’ll just need to drag your tail and your gear down to a large parking lot (your choice of six) early in the morning — the bus driver will take it from there.

And by “early,” I mean before 5:30 am — the buses have to take a circuitous route to the field (to get around all the people in cars), and that means that even with every bus in town on the job, the first wave of buses in will be on the road by 5:30 — and tied up in traffic until 6:30 or so. Show up too late, and you might not get a seat on the second wave of busses — and the last bus in leaves at 7:00.

Here’s the GPS track of our bus ride one day. We rode in from the Hoffmantown lot (parking for a local mega-church), and as you can see, minimizing drive time isn’t high on the priority list. It’s just the only way to dodge the log jam caused by thousands of cars trying to take the shortest route in from the interstate.

On the bright side, since this is a New Mexico event, when you get to the Fiesta grounds at an ungodly hour of the morning, you’ve got a very tasty breakfast burrito waiting for you…

Getting to Delicate Arch

Posted on 24 September, 2010 by Eric

So on our recent trip to Arches National Park, I definitely wanted to revisit Delicate Arch. Sure, it’s a “marquis” attraction, so you generally have to deal with crowds. Oh, and you’ve got to take a long, dry hike to get to the arch from the trailhead parking lot.

But it’d been 10 years since I’d seen it, and now that I have some decent camera gear I thought I ought to do it justice, photographically. Oh, and I’d heard it’s particularly photogenic at sunset — so after the obligatory 90 minute hike, I did get this nice shot:

When I previously hiked out to see Delicate Arch, we made the mistake of going in the middle of the day, and compounded our mistake by not taking water. This time I discovered the hike’s much more pleasant in the late afternoon, and having a quart or two of water per person is a great idea.

Here’s a shot of part of the trail, taken fairly early (i.e., near the trailhead) — if you look closely at the big slab of rock (on the left side of the image, about mid-way up), you’ll see some little dots that are hikers:

Of course, I wasn’t alone when I got to the arch — I had a few “neighbors:”

So you need to be patient to get the shot you want — lots of folks want to pose for pictures standing under the arch. Even then, you might need to use a little Photoshop magic to remove stray people from the shot you like best. Oh, and since you’re taking sunset shots, you’ll want a flashlight or head lamp if you linger very long after the Sun’s gone.

But of course, you already knew that, right?

Honest Abe

Posted on 1 August, 2010 by Eric

This is a pretty simple, staple shot inside the Lincoln Memorial at night. That said, it’s a surprisingly tough shot to get…

You’re not allowed to use a tripod inside the Memorial (some say it’s because the tripod legs damage the floor, others that tripods are a tripping hazard when the place is crowded). Meanwhile, the lighting is… subdued, to say the least.

I took this shot at ISO 1000 with an aperture of f/2.0 — and still, it required a one second exposure (and some noise cleanup with Topaz Denoise afterwards). Curious how to take a decent one second exposure without a tripod? It turns out that while tripods are banned in most Washington D.C. museums, monopods aren’t — not even ones with little pop-out tripod feet.

Go figure…

The iPad as photographer’s travel helper — a review…

Posted on 20 July, 2010 by Eric

Since I episodically do bursts of travel for my (non-photographic) job, and am barred from using my work laptop for non-work-related tasks, I’ve been looking for a device to help me with photography while on travel. Something that will let me back up and do a little light editing on images — but doesn’t have the heft and complications of carrying a second (non-work) laptop. Something lighter and smaller and with decent battery life.

So when my wife and I started discussing what we’d like for wedding anniversary presents this year (it’s a decadal anniversary, FWIW), I asked for an iPad. I wanted a way to look at images on a decent sized screen (so I at least have some chance of reshooting a photo I messed up), and to back up my images to a second device (vs. the memory cards) on the road. In a pinch, I also wanted a way to get particularly valued images to an offsite backup — via WiFi or 3G cell connection, whatever works. And in the future, I’m toying with the idea of creating a “Seldom Scene” iPad app — but more on that in a future post.

Anyway, the iPad arrived, I signed up for the unlimited 3G plan (just before it closed to new customers), and shortly afterward we left on a family road-trip vacation. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to give the gadget a workout. I anticipated having enough memory card storage for all the pictures I’d take, so if the iPad misbehaved I wasn’t in too much trouble. Meanwhile, most of the trip would be spent camping in our pop-up tent trailer — so we had 12 V DC power available as needed (trailer battery, topped off by a solar panel), but only occasionally wall power. Perfect for a device that recharges over USB.

So how well did it work for me? Well, I’m happy with it — although, of course, there’s always going to be room for improvement.

Image management

Getting images from the camera to the iPad couldn’t be easier. With the iPad Camera Connection Kit (purchased separately, can be a bit hard to find in stock), you pull them from your camera via USB cable or straight from the memory card (if you’re shooting to SD cards). Plug your gear together and the iPad will do the heavy lifting for you — the images get imported into the iPad’s Photos app, and the device handles duplicates intelligently (i.e., if you connect the same card / camera to the iPad multiple times without erasing the card’s memory in between, it’ll let you choose whether or not to import images it thinks are duplicates). Unfortunately, all the images you import into your iPad show up in a single (“All Imported”) album within the Photos app. There’s no way to further organize your shots on the iPad, you can’t create Albums / Events or move images between them — you’ll have to wait to get home to your main computer for that.

When it comes to getting your images *off* the iPad, that’ll be a function of the computer you’ve got, and what software you’re using. I’m a Mac guy, and use Aperture for organizing and doing the majority of editing of my images. In Aperture (screen capture below / left), images imported from an iPad show up as daily “Events” — although imports from multiple cameras create separate “Events” with the same date. It’s a bit clumsy, but nothing you can’t easily clean up afterwards by just moving images around on your Mac.

If you use iPhoto (above / right), you’ll get one event per day (regardless of how many cameras fed the iPad), but sometimes the events will be untitled. Go figure.

I was originally a bit concerned about how reliably the iPad would handle a mix of RAW images from my Olympus DLSRs and JPG / AVI files from my Canon point-and-shoot pocket camera. At least for my cameras, this rig handled RAW images perfectly — the images made it from camera to iPad to (later) desktop without any problems. And on the iPad, they worked just like a JPG file — due to the fact that any edits you make on your iPad are made to the JPGs embedded in the RAW files. Meanwhile, the point-and-shoot JPGs worked fine as well, as did the AVI video I took with the little pocket camera.

Note, though, that since your iPad only edits the embedded JPG from a RAW image, any saved edits (made via one of the dozens of iPad photo editing apps) will also be JPGs — and of reduced size, and saved to your iPad’s “Saved Photos” (vs. being mixed in with the “All Imported” photos). In Aperture, “Saved Photos” get their own album — while in iPhoto, they get mixed in with the “All Imported” photos as a function of date.

I haven’t experimented with my iPad and my wife’s Windows PC — so I can’t yet say how this combination plays together.

Offsite backup

If you’re really concerned about (at least some of) your photos, you’ll want to go beyond having just the original images on memory cards and a backup on your iPad. After all, they’re probably in near proximity of each other and could be lost in a pretty straight-forward accident or episode of theft. To deal with this, you need some way to back up a copy of your most important photos on hardware physically separate from your iPad and card wallet.

This is where life gets interesting.

Again, we’re assuming that you’re traveling with your camera gear and your iPad — no laptop or desktop to help you until you get home. Given that there’s no way (short of jailbreaking your iPad and dealing with UNIX shell commands) to connect an iPad directly to a flash or USB drive, you’ll need to look at wireless options for getting photos to a remote location. I explored four approaches:

Via email directly from the Photos app
Via email, using copy / paste (i.e., copying from the Photos app and pasting in Mail)
Via FTP (using an iPad app called FTPOnTheGo)
Via the use of Dropbox

I also briefly flirted with the idea of using MobileMe’s gallery as a way of exporting images from the iPad — but found that it seems to have “issues” with RAW images.

Anyway, the main complication that you’ll run into has to do with the iPad’s use of reduced-size versions of your images. Remember how I said that onboard editing of a RAW image resulted in a reduced-size JPG output file? When it comes to sending photos from your iPad to a secure place, some methods will send your full-size RAW file, while others will send a reduced-size JPG version of it. Some methods will even send a reduced-size version of a JPG original.

For my experimentation (I did this part at home before the trip), you’ll need to know that my DSLRs have a RAW image size of 3648×2736, while my point-and-shoot camera has a maximum image size of 3072×2304. Here’s what came through to my desktop machine:

Method	Output from RAW image input	Output from JPG image input
Email from Photos	Full size RAW	Reduced size JPG (2048×1536)
Email using copy / paste	Reduced size JPG (1600×1200)	Full size JPG
FTP using FTPOnTheGo	Reduced size JPG (1600×1200)	Reduced size JPG (2048×1536)
Using Dropbox	Reduced size JPG (1600×1200)	Reduced size JPG (2048×1536)

So if you want to do off-site backup of images you’ve transferred to your iPad, unfortunately your best approach is a function of your image’s file format. In either case, you’ll be emailing an image somewhere (I’d recommend gmail, since the file sizes will be large), but dealing with RAW images (emailing directly from the Photos app) is less convoluted than copying from Photos and pasting into an email in the Mail app.

Also, in my experience, sending images from the road via WiFi is dramatically faster than using 3G — most coffee shop WiFi links I’ve tried have respectable upload speeds (100s of kbits/sec), while at least in the U.S., 3G upload speeds are far slower (kbits/sec).

Conclusions

An iPad may not be perfect for every photographer’s needs, but they provide a nice mix of capability, weight, and size at a not-too-exorbitant price. Would I use one for backing up images from a high-stakes professional shoot? Not on your life — you’d really want a Chase Jarvis bombproof workflow with laptops and multiple hard drives in multiple locations for that. But for providing extra security for your more-valuable photos that you capture on the road (and at the same time, providing other fun and useful capabilities), an iPad is a great solution.

And of course, there are other photographic uses for an iPad too — they make great mobile portfolios, for starters.