christopher's lives (v5.3)

balloon season is here and this is an old favorite of mine with some new modifications to snap it up a bit… here is the original from oct 1, 2005…

this was taken at albuquerque international balloon fiesta with my first real digital camera (lotsa stuff is broke at that link, btw)… i have no idea how it came out so good – it was totally a lucky shot, pointed, clicked, and it was just there… i have always had an affection for it and there was very little to do when i touched it up for this re-post… i enhanced the colors a little and sharpened the whole thing a bit, cropped a bit off the bottom, brightened it a hair, but, that’s it… i am considering doing a fancier edit, but, this will do for now…

anyway, tomorrow is the local, pathetic little balloon thing and we are about three weeks away, i guess from the REAL balloon fiesta in abq and, rest assured, i will be taking my dslr and my little canon p&s with plenty of cards…

ok, i finally posted the rest of the photographic miscellany from november…
this month, i have finally begun something i have thought about doing for awhile… pretty much every month i post pics of hot air balloons i see from my balcony, but, this month i now have the pic with the name of that balloon, the home city, and pilot… there is no website i can find that is a visual guide to balloons and that’s a shame because they are all unique vessels with their own story, etc., so, i intend to start posting the name and other info about every balloon i get a pic of… i would love for enthusiasts who know something i don’t to post what they know… thanks to this album maker, every pic has a comments form, so, anyone who wants can post info… there are many balloons that are not in the book i am using for reference, so, every month there will be unknown balloons, if you know who it is, just leave a comment on the pic and let me know… i also know some balloons have a website, so, i also want to start adding links with the pics…
this could be fun and, if this collection grows large enough, i will make a dedicated section for it…

i know, scott… i’m a sick man :P

ok, that aside, there are less than 40 of the “various” pics this month, mostly from a night at paulette’s…
click here to view the november pics

(and, if you didn’t see them previously, november also had a hundred or so pics, most of them amazing, from my flight to L.A. and 62 pics from the church thanksgiving hootenanny…)
.

in other news, come to find out my site has been seriously screwed up in internet explorer this whole time and no one told me about it until a couple days ago… my sidebar was loading on the right where it’s supposed to, but all the way at the bottom of the rest of the content… this has now been fixed, thanks to Doug… if i had asked him first, i would not have had to spend half the day pulling my hair out, beating my head on the table, etc…. thanks a bunch, dude!

i love this one so much, i just had to make a post…
it was just posted yesterday by phrog8v8r to the AIBF flickr pool…

*right click, save as, set as wallpaper* :)

.
.
and, btw, not to take away from that pic, but while i am pointing out pics, this is one of the coolest special shapes i have ever seen… and be sure to read the comments under it…

and this one is like Skies of Arcadia come to life…

The pics are finally up!

not as good as the pics i made last year, but, meh…

i used the Experience skin again and it is annoying no end that it labels videos as directories… i even added comments to the vids, so the comments would appear under the icon, but, it didn’t do that… so, you will have to keep that in mind… i do recommend the vids, there are some good ones this time… also, remember, my host is weird about streaming, wants me to put them under a subdomain and such, so, you will have to right click, save as and view them on your computer…

also, this time i have sort of a guest photog… as mentioned in the last post, Andy Shreck went with me and took a bunch of pics himself, so, there is a folder of my selections from the pics he took… he has the entire collection in his possession, but alas, no site of his own, no flickr account, nothin’…
for the record, as i was sorting through all the pics (from a collection of over 500, i whittled down to 177 pics and vids) i was more and more certain that he took better pics than i did :(
anyway, i also added a few that i took to my flickr photostream and added a couple each to the three flickr groups i am in…

while i was playing around in flickr, i went ahead and grabbed the flash “flickr badge”, which is fairly cool… see it over on the sidebar right above the albuquerque section… i may or may not keep it…

anyway, i am hoping for no wind on saturday so i can get much better pics…

oh, and not only are all the photos in albums, i added comments to many of them, rather than write up a whole blog post, pointing out certain pics… you will see a truncated version below the thumbnails and the whole comment when you view the screen size version…
i took a few today hanging out behind the church and will have a whole new batch saturday, so, i will force myself to learn how to add albums to the one already there and will post when they are up…

remember the Smokey Bear balloon i took a pic of?

well, he made big news today…

with headlines like Balloon Gets Caught In Radio Tower [koat tv] and Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta ending with a bang: “Smokey the Bear” balloon is wrapped around the top of a 670ft AM radio tower, four people in gondola [fark]…
and someone in the fark thread mentioned it was even on cnn…

behold…

i ALMOST saw it happen… i was recording the mass ascension coverage on tv this morning and popping downstairs once in a while to see if there was anything worth taking pics of… last trip i had made down, i saw smokey and almost took a pic since he was in a good spot, but, i have not been taking many pics since we went to the event, not much chance of topping those… anyway, so, i then came back upstairs… within a minute or two they were talking about it on tv… i bet i missed it by 30 seconds…

by the time i ran out there, all i saw was this…

the reports are still coming in, but, it is now confirmed that there were three people aboard, all ok, they were able to get out of the gondola to the ladder that runs inside it and climb down… it took nearly an hour… there was the 70-year-old pilot, and two passengers on their first balloon ride ever… they were 14 and 10 years old… he sent them down the ladder first…

here is the pilot climbing down the tower, and here he is after they got him in a cherry picker, as he and a rescue worker look up at the tattered remnants of the balloon…

of course, the big question now is how they are going to get that thing down from there…

garth’s informal predictions at America’s Outback didn’t include radio towers, but, turns out he was right about the power lines…
Balloon catches on live power line, no one injured
Balloon Fiesta Pilot Trips Up With Power Line

other headlines the last few days have included…
Balloon Fiesta Brings Injuries, Power Outage
Rough landings, snagged balloons mark morning
Pilots Injured As Balloon Makes Hard Landing Near Chama
Gas balloon makes hard landing, injures pilots

here is a google news search if you want to see more…

and the whole 10-day event has also been well blogged…

America’s Outback has great pics from the day 7 special shapes mass ascension…

mr. bohnsack posted many pics from the day 9 mass ascension with links to over 400 high-res pics from the three previous years… he also links a few other abq bloggers posting about the aibf… (including me; plus, i fit his comment about those with “freshly purchased digital marvels”…)

and Quirky Burque even gave us the Balloon Fiesta Avoidance Plan…

i am probably not going to keep up with posting all the follow up news and/or blog posts about it all, but, i will definitely get pics and vids again next year, and post ‘em all here…

there are a few pics and one vid from the last few days that i did not comment on, and now that it is all done, the vids will stay for a while until we need the space, so, take one last trip to the now completed AIBF collection…

so, this morning was the dawn patrol and mass ascension… the dawn patrol was pretty damn cool, but, the mass ascension was indescribably amazing…

it was pretty much impossible to count, but, there were definitely over 100, but definitely not 200… and there were a few “special shapes”, like a cow, a bottle, a scarecrow, a kettle of some kind, a couple that were what looked like bees maybe, and an american flag…

there are 13 pics and 3 vids, whittled down from a collection of over 350 combined that i took… the videos were the hardest to narrow down to the best of the best, so, i settled for the ones that best showed just how big this whole aerial display was.. check them out before i delete them tomorrow… 1, 2, and 3

a few more besides what i commented on above, all the pics from this morning’s set start with “2a-”…

the “Fiesta Challenge Competition Flight”…

a bit underwhelming, i must say…

it was cool, at first; a whole bunch of ‘em taking off at once, but, there weren’t THAT many (c’mon, people, you said seven hundred!), it took up a very small section of vision, and they only went a very short distance and then landed (except for one blue one that darted up, leaving the others wayyy behind, headed north, and last i saw him, vanished over rio rancho), so, the main entertainment was over pretty quick…
at least from where i was standing… for this sort of event, my location is not close enough, it seems, because it is starting to look like this thing does not do well at long distances… or maybe i’m just doing it wrong… either way, i keep getting these pics of specks, ranging in sharpness from fuzzy to blurry, which isn’t very interesting…

anyway, to be fair, the whole thing really officially starts tomorrow and i see some very cool stuff coming up on the schedule, so, as i am wont to say, we shall see what there is to see when the time for seeing comes… (wish i could remember what that is from…)

this time, there are 4 pics and 1 vid… the pics are rather similar, but, it is kind of cool how you can see a helicopter in the vid, though…
they are all in the ABF subdir and the files from this event all start with “1b-”, as previously mentioned…

btw, i made something of a connection… i was thinking of those window air conditioners growing up in hellishly humid dallas suburb summers… the underside would be practically an upside down puddle of condensation… the water forms into droplets in random places, and the drops fall, usually more than one drop at a time, sprinkling whatever is underneath… that is what the balloon launches remind me of, as you watch many of them inflating at once, some get to fully inflated and then “drip up” into the sky…

big day tomorrow, including the first dawn patrol and the first mass ascension… no idea what the dawn patrol will be like, but, the mass ascension should be mind-boggling…

i said i’d be ready next time and at about 9am i walked out on the balcony and had to dash in to grab a camera…

and then it was gone…

but, the Albuquerque International Balloon Festival starts friday morning!
expect lots of pics!

yes, at 8am this morning, there were five visible out the window from where i sit on the couch now, so, i went out on the balcony and counted a total of nine…
none of them were very close, but, what a sight as they just hang there in the sky…
i tried to take a couple pics, but, no chance with the dreameye…

and it seems to me i may be better off waiting to take pics until october 1st to 10th, when the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta takes place just down the street from us…
said to be the largest hot-air balloon event in the world… i saw a panoramic poster of the event in a poster shop the other day…

mind-blowing…

and, yes, it is literally just up the street from us, so, i think it is time to quit putting off the purchase of a real digital camera because these things are going to be filling the sky all around us…

here are a couple pics…
keep in mind that these things are, on average, from 30 to 60 feet tall and there are HUNDREDS of them! (in 2000, there were over a thousand balloons!)

these pics were taken from TravelManiac Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta and they have a lot more pics worth seeing…

and here are some more links i collected as i looked around for info this morning…
i have never been here for this event before, but, i gather that the highlights include many balloons in odd shapes and sizes, the “mass ascension”, presumably all the balloons lifting off at once, and the “Glowdeo”, a night-time event with lit-up balloons…
so, keep that stuff in mind when following the links…

Google Image Search: albuquerque mass ascension
Google Image Search: albuquerque balloon glow
VirtualAlbuquerque.com: The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta [this one has vids]
ABQjournal: Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta [coverage of last year's AIBF, with lots of links and AMAZING pics, if you only follow one link, make it this one]
FAA Notices to Airmen

HowStuffWorks: Hot-Air Balloons

expect more posts about this in the future…