555 Luftballons

Morgan Stanley was apparently sufficiently impressed by my anti-Wall Street tirades in this forum that I was invited to their Corporate Tent this morning for Albuquerque’s annual Balloon Fiesta.

(Thank you, Morgan Stanley!  Our motto: “Hardly ever indicted!”)

This involved getting up at 5am, a time at which I am rarely comfortable, and driving through the bleak pre-dawn blackness to the balloon field on the far side of Albuquerque.  it was a beautiful still morning, and when the first balloons rose it was still completely dark, the sky illuminated only by the brilliant propane flares glowing on the inside of the colorful canopies.

This year there were something like 550 balloons, all launching within an hour or so.  The “special shapes” balloons— the Fireman, Smokey the Bear, Darth Vader, the Princess, the Bees— launched last of all, because oddly-shaped balloons are prone to going wrong on launch, and if there were problems it could delay a whole flight.

The winds formed what is called a “box”— when the balloons launched, they drifted south; but as they rose a little higher, a different wind carried them back north again.  So we saw the same balloons over and over again, and quite a number landed on the same field from which they launched.

550 balloons all in the air at once.  More than any photograph can contain.

A note on the photos: It was still fairly dark when most of the balloons went up.  The sun rose on schedule, but was largely concealed by cloud.  The result was a lesson in how differently the human eye views something as opposed to a camera.

What I saw was a lot of brilliantly-colored balloons floating in the air.  What the camera saw were a lot of round, dark, murky objects silhouetted against the bright sky.

On that account the photos needed a fair amount of work with brightness, contrast, lightness (as distinct from brightness), and color saturation (because I can rarely resist playing with the color saturation).  The results are a little Kodachrome-y, but I hope they transmit the colorful, harmless joy of the balloon season.

And thanks again to my friends at Morgan Stanley for the hospitality and the lovely viewing platform.