Idaho Airships, Inc.

If you have an interest in aerial photography of Idaho Falls, please visit our Gallery and select the Idaho Falls, Idaho album.

We’ve made multiple trips to Idaho Falls and the surrounding area (Rexburg, Blackfoot, Pocatello, et. al.) during 2007, in part because the area is booming…economically, that is.

The Idaho Nuclear Laboratory program most certainly a major factor. That’s why I’m hesitant to use the word “boom.” Or to talk about “glowing” reports.

The images you’ll see were produced as documentary artifacts…they were shot with a stabilized system with lenses as long as 400mm. Between June and August, 2007 we shot over 2,000 aerial images of Idaho Falls alone, but the posted collection contains only 30. If there is a subject or composition you’re considering please contact us by e-mail (lgeis@idahoairships.com) or phone (1.208.344.7410)…at least, until we get our stock image library up and running, which probably won’t be until November, 2007.

We did stretch our artistic legs a bit on the visits. Above is an aerial of the opening night at the new Melaleuca Stadium in Idaho Falls. This is not a composite, or “blended image”…it’s a single exposure. The traffic stretching back toward Challis and fireworks are synthesized-we really can’t capture that sort of exposure from the air. It’s tack sharp at 36″ tall.

This image of the Idaho Falls Mormon Temple is actually from an HDR original. There is detail through the windows and detail in the trees coming out of the 48-bit composite, but I ended up with this render because the I really like the “night” character. This image has the resolution to print at 8+ feet tall-it’ll just use a bit more than the usual black ink.

A Note to Those In the Know: Yes, the HDR blend was corrupted by the water’s movement. I seriously considered pulling a 16-bit frame from RAW for the bottom half and using it to replace the HDR-derived portion, but thought that might somehow be less than respectable. I admit to some cleaning of the HDR-induced fringing in the river reflection. The glow of the structure was addressed using a Layer Mask adjusted as a separate document using Levels, Minimize, Threshold, Gaussian Blur, and painting, then imported back as a Layer Mask via Apply Image. The background is black (as in <10, <10, <10) proximally to the building…if you sense any residual glow, it’s an illusion produced by the extreme contrast and/or .jpg smear.

L