first, let me get this out of the way…
here are three resources for webcams in albuquerque…
ABQcam, AWS cams, and KOBTV’s city cams…
and here is the schedule of events…
if you show up at the right time, you may get lucky… there were a few visible on abqcam this morning, of the others, several are down, so, i have not checked them…
ok, now on with the post…
this morning, i got up at 6am for the first event, “Albuquerque Aloft”, which was balloons rising from elementary schools all over town…
i am still getting used to using a real camera, trying different white level settings, adjusting the edge enhancement, seeing what resolution works best, to use digital zoom or not, etc…. next year, my pics will be much better, though, i read the whole manual, and took hundreds of practice pics yesterday preparing for this…
i’ll say this, though: taking good pics of tiny balloons against a huge featureless sky is nearly impossible for me, so far… (i am open to advice if anyone wants to post any…)
anyway, so, this morning i took hundreds of pics and many videos… however, i have only 20mb of webspace free at the moment, so, i whittled them down to the 20 or so that were most upload-worthy…
http://insidiousplots.com/photos/2004-oct-AIBF/
ok, for reference, there are supposed to be two events today, so, i named the files from this morning “1a-(filename)”, the first event (a) of day one, and so the next event will be “1b-(filename)”, etc…. should make browsing the directory easier when they start to pile up…
now, here is how we are going to do this…
all the pics are already uploaded, BUT, the vids are not… they are being uploaded as i write this… there are eight of them, at least 30 minutes each to upload, so, it will be awhile until they are all up…
however, since i have comments about some of them, i am still going to mention them, with the links, and so, if you get a dead link, it is almost certainly either because it is not uploaded yet or because it is already deleted, more on that to follow…
like yesterday, the vids are TEMPORARY, they will almost certainly be deleted when i post tomorrow’s batch of stuff (and maybe even when i post tonight’s)… before i started uploading today’s stuff, i first deleted the vids i posted yesterday, as i said i would have to because they just take up too much room…
so, they will only be available for 12 to 24 hours, depending on how everything works out, and then gone forever…
anyway, now that we have agreed on the rules, let us move on…
amazing…
surreal…
breathtaking…
trippy…
around us, in more than one direction, we could make out balloons inflating on the horizon… to the east, there suddenly started appearing many balloons, not sure what that area was, but, there must have been 20 or 30 coming from that spot alone… the only problem is that i had to shoot into a dark hazy area, with the sun right above it, so, they did not come out too great… which is why i called these pics hazy 1, hazy 2, and hazy 3…
balloons just kept popping up and drifting away, so, i usually got no more than 10 in a shot, but, i took at least one video of a pan across the mountains to try to show the numbers involved…
word is there are some 700 balloons registered for this year…
these things get REALLY close to our apartment… here is an example… i called this balloon “santa fe” (hey, i have to come up with file names, so, i try to think of descriptive names for the balloons)… and here is a halfway decent vid of it… in fact, it stayed within this area, so, i also have a video of it landing…
and, speaking of landings, i also got video of this yellow one landing behind the mall… the video is in three sequential parts: 1, 2, 3…
btw, one set of batteries lasted me all morning and even the sorting process afterward, but, that was about it…
tonight i will try out the rechargeables…
and i think i am going to abruptly stop here…
there are still a few more in there that i did not comment on, so take a moment to have a look…
(oh, to spare confusion, i guess i could mention that this one is called “seagull” because it had seagulls painted on it, even though you can’t see that in the vid…
next event is the Challenge Competition Flight, this evening from 5p to 7p (about three hours from now), i have no idea what to expect, but, the pics and vids will be posted tonight…
and there are nine more days of this to come…
