Morning Balloons

I was heading out for a bike ride a couple of weeks ago, and as I opened the garage door to put the bike on top of my Passat, there were at least a couple of dozen balloons up in the air visible from the house. Yes, Balloon Fiesta is almost upon us, and I guess I'll probably go out there for the first time in years, now that I'm shooting a nice DLSR - who can pass up photographing such colorful objects.

I've had more noise in my photos than I'd really like, and I was considering moving to full-frame but decided to upgrade lenses first. I'll still move to full-frame one of these days, at least for some of my shots. Actually, I think the setup I'd like to have is a 7D crop-sensor for sports work and a Mark 5D ii full frame for landscape, portrait, wedding work. But for now, I'm the proud new owner of a new EF 24-70 f2.8 USM and 70-200 IS USM ii (Canon's newest 70-200), and I'll keep shooting the EOS 50D, for now, although I'll be on the hunt for a wider-angle lens than the 24-70 (and something I can still use on full frame later).

The first batch of photos on these lenses turned out so much cleaner and sharper event at 1600 ISO on the EOS 50D. I can't imagine what the Mark 5D images would look like (well, I can since I've viewed so many on Flickr). The 70-200 is especially sweet - I can't believe how good the images are off that long zoom, and so far the Autofocus seems really fast and on-target.

I'll be shooting the races at Sandia Motor Speedway, Saturday so I'll get a chance to put the 70-200 through its paces.  And the Patriot Triathlon is taking place next weekend here in Rio Rancho, and I plan on having fun with that lens out there, as well.

All of the shots below were shot with my EF 400mm f5.6 USM lens that I recently bought, and before I'd gotten the other L-lenses. Once I saw the images from this lens, I knew that I'd have to upgrade to the L-lenses in the shorter focal lengths and that they would have to have awesome images.

Click on the images to get a bigger view (and again to see them even bigger).

Canon EOS 50D

EF 400mm f2.8 USM Lens

Some were really high:

And some were really low:

This one came almost directly over the house and I had to let it drift away a bit, otherwise the 400mm lens was too long:

I love how the 400mm L-quality lens resolved the little tiny flag on the yellow/red/orange balloon in these next two shots: