the ballooning community is a tight knit group to begin with, even among pilots in general. every flight is an adventure, you really don't know where you'll end up. it's hard for fixed wing pilots to understand how we can take off for a flight, and not know exactly where we'll land. and i think it's this sense of adventure that makes us that much of a tighter group. so when a fellow balloonist gets hurt, we all feel it. and this is especially true of chuck waltz. he was in accident this past weekend, flying in the nationals down in south carolina. as of this writing, he's back in michigan at the u of m hospital. he's in stable condition and doing well, all things considered.

you can click on the picture below to go to chuck's page and check on his status. it probably won't be updated daily, but it will be often. there will also be a permanent link over on the right that won't move. go to the status page and let chuck, cindy and family know that we're thinking about them every day. leave your thoughts in the comments at the bottom of the page.

this isn't chuck's balloon, but one from a flight a couple of weekends ago. i'll try to get one of chucks posted.

here's a couple of photos that show how i setup my flash for the picture in the previous post.

 i'm using a manfrotto super clamp, along with a giottos mini ball head, to hold up the vivitar 285hv flash, synced with elinchrom skyport wireless triggers. whew. here's a closer view of the setup.

i under expose the shot about a full stop, making the subject pop from the background. i use this type of setup at a lot of the trail races since they are most often through the woods in low light conditions. the images above are of the setup for the post below.

tried something new on one of the recent races that i photographed. i set up a regular hot shoe flash clamped to a tree branch, and triggered it with wireless remotes. you can read more about lighting like this at the strobist website. i had one of the course marshals stand in for me to get the exposure right, but the light changed throughout the race. it was a beautiful day with big white fluffy clouds, so the sun kept going in and out, making it difficult to expose right every time. i did a little adjustment in lightroom when needed. 

overall, most of them came out pretty good. there was a few times that the flash just couldn't keep up, so there were some very dark images. i'm looking into making some external battery packs for the flashes, i went through three sets of AA batteries on this race. man were they HOT when i pulled them out of the flash.

i've been photographing more races lately, marathons, triathlons and trail races. i've got at least one race every weekend for the next couple of months. been learning more about exposure and lighting, and have also been trying some off camera lighting, ala strobist style. as soon as i get some of them processed, i'll post a couple here. in the meantime, this is from a race a couple of weeks ago.

it was lightly raining off and on most of the morning, but it was still a nice day for a race. i overexposed about a half stop to kinda make up for the gray, flat light.

weather here has been weird lately.we'll have a couple of great days in a row, and then the storms blow through. it'll rain and the wind will blow for three days, and then another couple of nice days. i always love the clouds after a big storm has passed. i took this one a week ago at about 9:00 in the evening after one rolled through.

 the temp's dropped 15 degrees, the air has that nice "new" smell to it and everything is all quite. days like this, i really like michigan.

the printer's up and running, all the jets unclogged. i've ordered a bunch of ink cartridges and paper and i should "ready for business" in a couple of weeks. now i can sit down and experiment with the different setting to what'll give me the best quality posters.

the family went to a reunion, my moms side, down in ohio a couple of weeks ago. it was great to see aunts and uncles that I haven't seen in a while.the boys thought it was great………. that there was an indoor pool at the hotel we stayed at. they pretty much lived in the pool, except of course at meal times.

in the lobby of the hotel, there were brochures about some of the covered bridges in the county we were in.  so my uncle and i decided to do a photo tour of a few of them. we covered about 50 miles, saw some scary shacks that people were living in, a couple of really nice mansions out in the middle of nowhere and a weird geodesic dome/farm on top of a hill. oh, and a couple of covered bridges. 

the pictures just didn't look right in nice crisp color, so i tweaked them a bit to make 'em look like old photos.

 to me, they look like they should. i guess i could have gone into photoshop and applied some textures to make them look beatup and scratched, and i still might try it later, but that's not what i was going for here.

well, they're gone.

i'm amazed at how short a time the chicks stay in the nest. we left friday morning for ohio to go to a family reunion and the chicks were still there. saturday, my neighbor took a couple of pictures, so they were still there then. when we got home on sunday, they were gone. more than likely things just got too crowded. oh well, we'll see her next year.

on a side note, looks like i had the white balance set wrong on the camera. was probably set for cloudy, which will add some warming to the image, so it's looking a bit too yellowish.

another few days and it'll be awfully crowded in there.

you can see all four of them now, well, at least four beaks. the feather are starting to come in, they look like a pile of fluff with beaks. getting better at taking the pictures while mama is out, i clipped a couple of small branches inside the bush to make things easier. i can get a couple of shots off in under a minute, trying to disturb them as little as possible.

traveling down to ohio this weekend for a family reunion, hoping to be able to wander around a bit and do some photography. 

so here's the baby chicks at day six. they're starting to look more like baby chicks and less like a pile of pink worms. starting to see the feathers and beaks. mama doesn't seem to squawk at me as much now, but i'm trying to be better about taking the pictures when she's not around. to give you an idea about the size, the nest is about as big as a softball.

on another note, i've just discovered that a lot of the pics from older posts are missing. i was rearranging my picture directories when i was looking into using a different photo album software, and i deleted a directory without realizing it. i think i have a backup somewhere and hopefully i can restore them.

i've got the printer working! after spending all day saturday taking the print heads apart, i discovered an airlock in the lines of the two colors between the print head and the reservoir. once i cleared the lines, and reassembled the printer, all six colors were printing. i still have a few nozzles that are clogged, but these can be easily cleaned.

nooooooo…not cheryl. we have a couple of burning bushes in front right next to the door. there's a robin that's nested there for the last three or four years. every time we walk out the front door, she goes flapping and screeching at us as she flies off. after the first year we thought she wouldn't come back, but she still does, rebuilding the same nest. last week after scaring the crap out of us a couple of times, reminding us that she's back, we started checking the nest while she was away and found four little blue eggs. friday the 23rd they hatched and on sunday i took a couple of pictures. i was thinking about putting up a web cam with a live feed, but didn't have enough time to research it with my provider on how to set thing up. so every couple of days i'll sneak up while she's out "grocery shopping", grab a couple of shots and post 'em here. here they are on day two.

i have the printer working now, but i think i have a bad print head. it's a six color printer, and two of the colors aren't printing at all. i have a tech support email in to epson, hopefully they get back to me soon. i'll update here when something happens.