Eyes to the Skies- Balloon Festival 2013

This past weekend the main reason for the journey to Chicago was the Lisle Eyes to the Skies Balloon Festival.  I've always thought it would be cool to photograph hot air balloons and this looked like an awesome opportunity.  My first opportunity to photograph the balloons was at 5:30 in the morning on Friday.  It was there I found out that the public wasn't allowed on the launch field until the balloons had been inflated.  While this was a bummer from a photographic perspective it was still awesome to watch the balloons inflate from afar.  After they were up we were able to go out and meet the pilots, fortunately I got to go up on a free tethered ride thanks to a generous pilot thus introducing me to my first airborne trip in a hot air balloon.  After chatting with the pilots I was definitely excited to come back that night for the balloon glow.  That night while waiting for things to get started I heard that a pilot needed a crew and I quickly volunteered.  This was my opportunity to be on the field while the balloons were inflated!  While I obviously had to spend most of my time working on getting the balloon in the air, I was fortunate enough that our "Purple People Eater" shaped balloon got up quickly (though we had to bring it down not long after), and I was able to photograph other balloons getting up in addition to the few I snapped of ours.  It is truly an amazing process to get a balloon with over 100,000 cubic feet of space in the upright position, I enjoyed every minute of it.  The same opportunity presented itself the next night and I got to learn even more about balloons and how they work.  This time we were able to keep our balloon up for a good long while and everyone got to see a crazy shaped balloon.The combination of all of these opportunities led me to get some fun pictures.  While I hope to get to photograph the launch of a balloon without having to worry about duties associated with that, I enjoyed the opportunity to learn where good pictures could be taken and when to take them.  Though I was able to capitalize on some of these moments, many I was required to be elsewhere without my camera.  So hopefully this isn't my first and last festival as I look forward to more opportunities to come.This work by JD Maloney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.