This year was the 20th anniversary for the annual Ballooning event in my hometown, Bowling Green, KY. The event was previously known as the Balloon Classic, now, it’s Balloon, Tunes, and BBQ. There are some big sponsors and all the profits go towards the United Way of Southern Kentucky.

I was excited to go and grab some photos, footage, and timelapse of the event. The weather almost didn’t cooperate, but it turned out to be a nice afternoon.

I would have killed to have my Manfrotto monopod! I left it at home and all my shots aren’t very stable. Gear is no good if you leave it at home 🙁 Thanks to smoothcam filter in Final Cut though, I was able to straighten out some footage.

Here's my "tripod" set up for the time lapse at the end of the video.

I set up two timelapses without a tripod. For both of them I set them on top of my Tenba messenger bag and hooked up my remote timer and they worked out okay.

For the longer time lapse, I set the camera to aperture priority and moved the single focus point as high as I could make it go in the frame. That way I would be metering off of the sky and not the flickering balloons.

By doing this the shutter would gradually decrease on it’s own as the sun set and not jump around too drastically so I wouldn’t get too much of the flickering effect once I made the time lapse.

The iPhone - love it! Taken while the time lapse was going. I used 3 apps to make this image: TrueHDR, TiltShift Gen, and CrossProcess.

I set my timer to take a photo every 3 minutes and set the images to medium jpeg to save space on the card.

I got lucky with where I set up my camera. I wasn’t sure when or how many balloons were going to participate in the glow, but I picked a decent spot up on a hill so the fact that my camera was low to the ground (on top of my bag), it didn’t really affect my composition too much.

Hope you enjoy the short video above and a couple of my favorite photos from the afternoon below: