(no subject)
Hooray I'm back from bristol and it went well.
We got to our camping pitch and set up in the early afternoon and then left for the fiesta at about 4. When I booked the camping pitch I was told the fiesta site was about 5 minutes away but it turned out to be about 45 minutes over rough terrain! It was good exercise! Anyways we got there for the evening balloon launch but the weather wasn't right and the same thing happened on Friday morning but Friday evening turned out to be the winner and 110 balloons took off inside an hour, it was awesome. It really takes me back to being younger when there used to be a balloon fiesta in Southampton, I used to look forward to going all year.
So yeah, we had a good time and camping was fun, I really enjoyed myself and I think nix did too although she didn't feel well for some of the time and I really felt bad for her.
We also saw some helicopters and a spitfire and an old hawker sea hawk doing display flying which we could see from our camp site.
I made a major mistake and forgot my bag full of camera lenses so I was stuck with my cheap kit lens the whole time which drove me nuts! Also, although the weather was good enough for the balloons to fly it was pretty overcast and coupled with the fact that my camera doesn't have spot metering A lot of photos came out exposed for the sky and not the balloons so the balloons were too dark. I was trying to adjust the exposure compensation constantly but so much was happening it was hard to not miss shots whilst getting the exposure right manually during constantly changing light conditions. This is the first time I have ever missed spot metering and wanted a new camera, if you don't know what spot metering is it basically means the camera pays attention to only a small area in the middle of the viewfinder (some cameras you can move the spot) so that you can make sure your actual subject is exposed correctly above everything else whereas with normal metering the camera measures the light intensity all across the whole scene and calculates an average so if your subject only takes up part of the frame and is darker or lighter than the average it will either come out too light or dark.
Anyway, I took 600 or so shots and managed to get a pretty decent number of keepers so here you go:
We got to our camping pitch and set up in the early afternoon and then left for the fiesta at about 4. When I booked the camping pitch I was told the fiesta site was about 5 minutes away but it turned out to be about 45 minutes over rough terrain! It was good exercise! Anyways we got there for the evening balloon launch but the weather wasn't right and the same thing happened on Friday morning but Friday evening turned out to be the winner and 110 balloons took off inside an hour, it was awesome. It really takes me back to being younger when there used to be a balloon fiesta in Southampton, I used to look forward to going all year.
So yeah, we had a good time and camping was fun, I really enjoyed myself and I think nix did too although she didn't feel well for some of the time and I really felt bad for her.
We also saw some helicopters and a spitfire and an old hawker sea hawk doing display flying which we could see from our camp site.
I made a major mistake and forgot my bag full of camera lenses so I was stuck with my cheap kit lens the whole time which drove me nuts! Also, although the weather was good enough for the balloons to fly it was pretty overcast and coupled with the fact that my camera doesn't have spot metering A lot of photos came out exposed for the sky and not the balloons so the balloons were too dark. I was trying to adjust the exposure compensation constantly but so much was happening it was hard to not miss shots whilst getting the exposure right manually during constantly changing light conditions. This is the first time I have ever missed spot metering and wanted a new camera, if you don't know what spot metering is it basically means the camera pays attention to only a small area in the middle of the viewfinder (some cameras you can move the spot) so that you can make sure your actual subject is exposed correctly above everything else whereas with normal metering the camera measures the light intensity all across the whole scene and calculates an average so if your subject only takes up part of the frame and is darker or lighter than the average it will either come out too light or dark.
Anyway, I took 600 or so shots and managed to get a pretty decent number of keepers so here you go: