Wednesday, September 8, 2010

The show in the sky


While still working on editing more than a thousand images taken Saturday at the Miracle Mile Parade in Indianapolis, I decided to dedicate a post to some things in the sky that caught my attention during the parade. All of these were taken with a 70-200mm lens equipped with a 1.4x extender at its maximum focal range (so 280mm).

The commercial airplane -- well, I suppose it might not have been that big a deal except for the craft's bright red underbelly. Even when I first spied it (picture below), it was impressive, but then it turned slightly and caught the sunlight in such a way that it lit up the craft's underbelly (top), and that's when I did my audible "oooooo" while the shutter clicked away.





The balloon -- there must have been a dozen balloons -- all yellow -- that I saw released (whether accidentally or on purpose) from the spectator contingent at various points during the parade. I wasn't lucky enough to capture its marking except for the one occasion you see pictured above. Otherwise, the "faces" on all my images of skyward balloons from Saturday are a bright, solid yellow (below).






The party streamers -- well, the festive occasion was open for stuff like this to be thrown about. Some floated skyward unobstructed (above); unfortunately, some did not, and ended up caught in the telehpone poles and wiring (below).




Send in the clouds -- I guess the cloud formation below isn't that spectacular, but it did strike me as interesting ... and besides, I wanted another sky image for this post! I played the "guess what it look like" game when I pulled it up on my screen at home afterward.



An interesting thing about these sky images, at least to me, is that I was able to snag that rich blue color in most of them without benefit of a polarizing filter (which I usually turn to when this is actually an objective). I also did very, very little tweaking of saturation in post-processing.

It was that beautiful of a day.

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