This weekend was the hot air balloon & music festival at a nearby fair grounds. i took this from our back yard the first night of the festival. i had too much to do to make it to the festival, although i almost went ( $15 plus parking plus food, kept me home )
i thought this to be a very subtle use of deep depth of field, and hope(d) it will(would) be disimilar to many of the entries.
the birds/wire are close to one mile from the balloons.
for this shot there was a fair amount of post processing work. i knew when i took it that the sky was not going to be as true blue as i was seeing, and the overall colors would be flat. i selected the balloons, and the wire, and the birds, copied, and pasted to a new layer.
i then used curves, hue/saturation, and selective color to get the sky blue i saw, and gaussian blurred that slightly to remove noise. i then used curves, and hue/saturation on the balloons layer to bring out the colors of them and add some contrast to the colors. i then selected the wire and the birds, and used levels to blacken them. merged layers, resized, and USM 100, 0.6, 0.
this is probably the most worked on shot i have entered here. and hope you like it ;}
it was quite a site to see close to 30 balloons rise up all at the same time, espcially since i had forgotten about the festival. i wish i had done a three shot panorama of the sky to capture all of the balloons...
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It's interesting, they all look like they are at the same depth, just different sizes. An interesting and colorful chaotic pattern. A fortunate opportunity.
I like this photo because of the subject and composition IMHO. I think it would have been better if the birds made up more of the composition and were zoomed closer, even if that meant losing some of the balloons in the shot. This would have brought out more detail in the birds and emphasized the deep DOF.
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