When: August 19 – 21, 2005

What: Ten fullscreen panoramas of the Northampton Balloon Festival, celebrating its 15th year. This annual event is held over a Friday, Saturday and Sunday in mid-August and features stage entertainment, street performances, road-shows, trade stands, a spectacular funfair, evening fireworks displays and for the second year running, a dedicated concert arena for internationally recognized artists.

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Why: Adrian Salisbury has covered the balloon festival two years in a row for the Northampton Borough Council. “A balloon festival is a classic scenario where conventional photography just can’t do it justice.” Salisbury explains. “You’ve only got to watch the spectators looking from all around as the sky fills with balloons to realize that a single photograph can’t capture everything.”

How: This year the Council set an additional challenge for Salisbury, asking him to put the virtual tours online while the festival was still taking place, so website visitors could get a feel for what was available this year. Salisbury was there at 5:30 in the morning to capture the first flight, but strong winds threw a cramp in his plans. “As my brief was to create a storyboard in effect, I shot the balloonists hanging around as the news was announced and then headed back to start stitching,” he says.

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Using PTGui, Photoshop and Cubic Converter he stitched the first tour together and had it online within two hours of capturing it, then headed back to the fairgrounds to capture something of the show, including a log flume, roller coaster and a village of other fairground rides. After putting three more tours online, Salisbury headed back, again, to the fairgrounds. “Last year I focused on trying to get as high a shutter speed as possible and didn’t like the results. Then I saw Karl Harrison’s shots of the Street Fair in Oxford and saw how differently you could create tours by slowing the speed right down. That was my goal to try to create a different type of tour, more artistic that before. I was pleased with the results and worked into the early hours getting them live, “ he recalls.

After a few hours sleep, he was back at work 6 am Saturday: “With the sun just rising over the horizon it made for a perfect show. With my press pass I was given access to the arenas and tried to get as close into the atmosphere as I could without getting myself in trouble with the organizers. I then decided to get back into the middle of the crowd and try to portray the experience of being there. It was truly breathtaking!”
Saturday afternoon, all virtual tours were complete and online and his mission was accomplished. “The weekend was intense and very demanding. I had to work on my own initiative and decide what to capture and then turn it around in a very quick time frame. Thankfully this only happens once a year!” he says.

Equipment: Canon EOS 300D, Sigma 8mm lens, Manfrotto 303SPH head on standard tripod.

Salisbury: “For the past four months I have been using PTGui on a new PC laptop rather than Stitcher. I shoot 6 shots around and no nadir or zenith shot, import them into PTGui and save them out as 6000x4000 tiffs.

“I had actually tried working with just four images before this show, thinking they might stitch easier with the balloons moving overhead but with limited width for control points I chose to work with six. For each tour I also produced multi image tiffs and had to do a fair amount of editing using layer masks in Photoshop. This is done on my iMac and on average I spent 40 minutes editing each of the balloon shots in Photoshop. As always, I use the shadow tool to about 10% and then export three jpgs for Fullscreen, 56k and Java. The tours then go into Cubic Converter where I edit the bottoms and export.”
Email: Ady[at]opticalfx[dot]co[dot]uk