Richard Thomas' Photo Blog

Here’s the second photo in my occasional review series. Most people take a couple of seconds to work out what this is due to the unusual angle… I was on a balloon trip with my family in September 2007, we took off from Ronda at about 8.30 on a Saturday morning but there wasn’t much wind so we didn’t go very far. Another balloon (the one in this photo: Balloon over Ronda) that took off with us went pretty much straight up and straight back down again, but as we were paying customers and our flight had been postponed several times (ironically because it was too windy!) the pilot persevered, changing height until we got some lateral movement. After waking up half the population of Ronda by flying just over their flats (cue lots of sleepy, half-dressed people coming out on to their balconies to find us waving at them), we crossed the main road and headed into the campo.

After a while the wind dropped and at one point the altimeter and GPS confirmed that we were completely motionless, just hanging in the still air. We couldn’t land where we were as the ground was covered in trees, so we had to descend to pick up some momentum from the wind nearer the ground, then ascend to give us enough height to reach a clear field we could see ahead behind a couple of houses. As we were doing this for the third time I could see a couple of cyclists coming up the track that was just ahead of us. I thought that if we kept moving I might be lucky and they might pass directly beneath us so I got the camera ready. And this photo was the result! Being early in the morning the sun cast long shadows which I think look really effective from this angle. I wondered why they were going so slowly as the track looked flat from above, but once we had landed I realised it was a reasonably steep incline.

Our balloon trip was with Gloventosur.

Taken with a Nikon D1X and a Nikon 18 – 200mm VR lens at 200mm. Shutter speed 1/250th sec, Aperture f/8

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(Updated as some of the text was missing from the version originally published. Still getting the hang of this blogging lark!)

Tags: aerial, cyclist, early morning

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 8:13 and is filed under Photo Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.