I Wish I Could Do That

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But then what good would it really do me? Extra coolness points, for sure. This is a scene from the sideshow before the Great Forest Park Balloon Race.

Greetings from beautiful Blue Springs, Missouri, on the outskirts of Kansas City, where we are spending Thursday night. Tomorrow it's off to Marysville, Kansas, where my wife, Carolyn, went to high school. This weekend is her 50th anniversary class reunion. There's a homecoming parade down the old Main Street Friday afternoon, followed by a tailgate party for the alums and the Friday night high school football game. Saturday night is the anniversary party at the American Legion hall. That's a good thing since they will have a full bar, often hard to find in the conservative Sunflower State.

I'll be poking lenses into all of it and making notes for my anthropology term paper.

The Local Entry

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This balloon is at the Great Forest Park Balloon Race year after year. Charles Lindbergh flew The Spirit of St. Louis from near New York to near Paris in 1927. We get the big bubble of St. Louis over Forest Park on a more regular schedule. The couple below are some of the typical St. Louisans the balloon represents.

May not be able to do a post tomorrow. We're supposed to drive to Kansas City right after work tonight for a weekend anthropology expidition in the part of Kansas where my wife grew up. We'll see. The road trip, of course, will be well documented.

What To Do With Gray Skies

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With a subject like the balloon race, my solution was to screw on a telephoto, get in close and then pump some steroids into the pictures with Photoshop. The bottom two pictures give you a sense of scale of the aircraft.

Arise, Thou Mighty Bunny

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The Great Forest Park Balloon Race is not a race in the traditional sense with victory going to the fastest. All the balloons ride the same wind. They call it a hare and hounds event, and I suppose the pun is intended. The Energizer Bunny balloon, sponsored by the eponymous battery maker, takes off first. The rest start to follow several minutes later, launching one after the other. The winner is the chase balloon that lands nearest to the bunny. The event makes the news but somehow the winner is never announced, like anybody cares.

So here's a series of shots of the great pink wabbit being inflated and soaring off above the crowd. I'd be careful of that hole in the bunny's bottom if I were in the crew.

 



 



 

Gravity's Rainbow

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We are moving toward the balloon race itself. The warm-up was a team of skydivers. I don't know if these things are properly called parachutes or parasails (advice welcome). The top one looks like it's made of tubes but I can't tell if they are open to the front or not. 

These pictures were taken at or near full extension with a 100-400 mm lens on a camera with a 1.6 crop factor. The jumpers mostly looked like dull smudges from the ground. The day was perfectly blah, a sky-wide soft box with not enough wattage. As you can see at the bottom, not everyone was thrilled.

Light The Night

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A few more from Friday night's balloon glow in Forest Park. It's a good thing I'm tall so I could shoot over the heads of the mob on the park's central athletic field.  The third picture is the Energizer Bunny balloon, sponsored by Energizer batteries, whose headquarters is here. Gee whiz fact: the silly thing is taller than the Statue of Liberty. In this image, it gets an application of the Bunny Bottom Burner.

The actual balloon race was yesterday. The sky was a uniform gray so the images will not be brilliant, but we'll get to some.

It Had To Be B'loon Glow

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One of the major events on the St. Louis photo calendar happens this weekend, The Great Forest Park Balloon Race. This year is the 40th anniversary. Wow - I showed up in this burgh for college 45 years ago and wasn't very aware of it until I caught the photography virus.

The actual race is today. The Friday night event is the balloon glow. They stay tethered to the ground but repeatedly fire their burners to make a spectacular show after sunset. Much more of last night's and today's events to come. Note the little sign on the balloon in the bottom picture.

All that hot air. What a perfect metaphor for our election season.