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

I know it’s been over a month since I last posted, and it’s not because of lack of stuff to post… it’s just me being lazy :) I have been picking up my camera and shooting fairly often actually, I’m just getting stuck at the on-the-computer image processing step, which is quite ironic since I build Photoshop for a living. I really need a new computer to handle the load… but that’s a story for another time.

The other week I had the chance to shoot Janna and two of her cousins, Sara and Brynn, over at my friend Geoff’s house (he has studio lights, backgrounds, and space… things I am still working on acquiring).

This is really the first time I’ve spent several hours shooting models in a studio setup and I enjoyed it a lot. Hopefully I will get to do much more of this type of work as time goes on; I have a few other friends volunteering to model already :)

These are not necessarily the “best” shots of the night, but they give a good idea of what sort of things I was shooting. Geoff had a couple of good chairs to use, and as you can see I had a lot of fun with those. A big thanks to Geoff, Janna, Sara, and Brynn!

I’ll attempt to continue posting to my blog as time goes on…. so until next time, take care.

Tai