Canberra balloon festival 2008 - another disappointment

Yesterday I woke up at 5.15am to capture some photos of the 2008 Balloon Festival. We got there at 6.00 only to find the reflection pool empty. The only reason anyone would get up at that hour would be to take some great photos of hot air balloons in the reflection of the pool. Last year I also got up at some ungodly hour only to get to the balloon festival to find a gaudy fence around the reflection pool. Why oh why would the Canberra council plan maintenance of the pool to coincide with the balloon festival? The mind boggles.

By 7.00am not even one balloon had been 'blown up' (because of some slight wind maybe) so Dave and I left. So I don't even have a photo of a balloon to post here.

The following photos I have chosen because I want to highlight a couple of things (mostly to non-Canberrans):


In this photo, note:

a) the lack of water in the reflection pool (bottom of the photo)
b) all the people up at the crack of dawn to see the non-existent balloons
c) only some of the beautiful colours you will see on the trees in autumn - truly, a beautiful sight - I cannot rave enough about this. This photo doesn't even do it justice, there are plenty more colours to see.


Getting up early for photography reasons does have some great advantages, note the pink in the sky. In this photo you can see the corner of Old Parliament House. And lastly, the tents of the 'tent embassy' bottom right corner.

Not great images by any stretch of the imagination, but they demonstrate my points.

These photos were taken on my old camera (the 350D) that I borrowed back from Richard. He thankfully replaced the kit lens with a decent 28-135 'all-rounder' type lens, a 3.5 to 5.6.