A vibrant balloon festival in the Animas Valley

As the morning sun crested the eastern edge of the valley, the vibrant patchwork colors of the balloons lit up the meadow to create a perfect moment for photography. I made a decision to shoot this event using the camera built into the new iPhone 14 Pro. With three different lenses, it gave me a fast and accurate way to capture both still and video imagery.

Here is a similar composition to the image above, but recorded as a video instead.

Following my typical workflow, the iPhone images were imported into Adobe Lightroom Classic. At this point, minor edits and cropping are used to enhance the images, although the advanced rendering of the iPhone makes the editing process a minimalist and efficient task. The machine learning algorithms that create the resulting HDR images aren't perfect, but computational photography such as the images produced on the iPhone are getting progressively better.

The ability to move quickly through the environment is a major advantage of using a camera phone. Another coveted feature is the image stabilization built into the video capture as you can see in this short 30 second clip. Shot handheld, without a gimbal stabilizer, the resulting footage is smooth and sharp. And with minor editing in the iPhone app itself, the resulting video is quite impressive.

Next year I'll remember to bring a large flask of decent coffee, to counteract the early morning chill. And come to think of it, a bag of hot roasted chestnuts in my jacket pocket would be a good addition as well.

 I'll leave you with this image Durango's own Western Spirit balloon rising into a beautiful cloudless Colorado sky.