Last weekend I took a day off of work and headed out to Eden, UT. I stayed with my aunt and uncle at their vacaction home and went kayaking, stand-up paddleboarding, hiking, and even spent an hour in a Flowrider wave machine! My other aunt and uncle, two of my cousins, and other family friends were all there too, so it was a great weekend!

One of the reasons I wanted to go was because the Ogden Valley Balloon Festival was happening that weekend and I have been wanting to shoot a balloon festival ever since I was a kid and saw some photos one of my other uncles took years ago; he is a pro photographer and used to own a hot air balloon, so he had some amazing shots from huge balloon festivals that he went to.

Thunderstorms were brewing all weekend, which put a damper on the ballooning and didn’t give me as many opportunities to shoot as I would have liked. Friday morning they probably should have gone up but didn’t, that evening they launched but I was hanging out at the local cocktail party, and on Saturday they only launched a couple in the morning and none in the evening as a wicked thunder, lighting, and rain storm came down on us. Sunday morning was beautiful though with the sun coming over the mountains in the east and dozens of balloons inflating across the field.

Hot air balloons are really cool and if you’ve never been up in one, I highly recommend it. I only managed to get into a tethered balloon this time around, but I went in my uncle’s balloon as a kid and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. If nothing else, a balloon festival is a beautiful sight to see even from the ground.

Tai

Last Thursday at the end of the Siggraph convention here in San Diego, I met a photographer named Rick who also happened to have recently hired on with my company (Adobe). He suggested we take our cameras out for a shoot along with his friend, local photographer Lisa Smith, so we headed off to Balboa Park for a night shoot.

Lisa is an advocate of the Lensbaby, a selective-focus SLR lens which allows you to selectively focus an area of the image by physically manipulating the lens (see their site for more details). This provides an entirely different level of creativity when composing a shot, allowing you to integrate selective focus, blur, and distortion in ways that you wouldn’t see with a normal lens. Here is a shot looking down El Prado, toward the tower at the Museum of Man, seen illuminated in green.

Notice the tower is clear, the sides are extremely blurry (this is not just depth of field), and there are worm-hole liking circular lines coming in from slightly left of center toward the tower (not sure what those are all about, but they’re cool!).

You can also see the rear reflectors of several bicycles who just passed by. They were dressed up in odd outfits and had been circling around the fountain behind where I took the shot. Unfortunately, I procrastinated in shooting them and missed my opportunity. I guess I was just having too much fun with the Lensbaby that Lisa let me borrow :) Thanks Lisa!

This weekend I’ll be back in Eden, UT hanging out with my aunt and uncle, and taking some shots of the local hot-air balloon festival. I’ll share images from that sometime next week!

Tai

Well, after a big hassle with my previous web host, it looks like my decision to get a new one has paid off! My new domain, tailuxon.com appears to be up and running; and just in time as I leave on my road trip Friday!

Over the next month or so I will be leaving San Diego and heading through Las Vegas, southern Utah, up to Grand Teton and Yellowstone and beyond. I don’t know how often I’ll get internet access, but I hope to periodically post updates and a few photos here as I travel through some of the great national parks I will be visiting and photographing along the way.

Note that my site and this blog are brand new so I haven’t had a chance to polish them as I’d like… I’ll try to at least alter the text colors to make them legible before too long :-)