Idaho Airships, Inc.

Idaho Airships, Inc. was honored to be contracted as the aerial photographer for several different subjects relating to this event: The 2008 Season Opener against Idaho State University, the new Skybox’s first event, and the new turf’s first game, et. al.

One of my intents on what turned out to be a 3 hour shoot was this image, which I initially shot when the Canon 5D (the previous king of handheld low light shooting) was new a few years back. However, the range of exposure with the 5D was violated by the brightly lit stadium in the background-the color and detail had to be synthesized in Photoshop. The 1DsMIII handled matters easily with only a bit of Blending Mode manipulation for Contrast and Saturation in the stands.

We produced several hundred images of the game, venue, and Skybox throughout the aftenoon’s fading light, including one I’ll post in the next few days with a sunset off to the west-yet another exercise in extreme contrast aerial photography. The image directly above is actually shot under very low contrast-nearly perfectly balanced lighting (I added a bit of contrast with Curves in Photoshop). The stadium lighting on the top of the Skybox is actually not clipped, incidentally. If you’re a technical shooter, you probably noticed the cyan on the round roof to the right-the frame was homogenously balanced for the stadium lighting, shifting the shadows to higher Kelvin, but I thought it worked well with the dominant orange in the stadium and the corresponding cyan in the parking lot on the left-I wasn’t being lazy!

Boise State won the game decisively, but that presents a problem in that my son and middle daughter both have designs on Idaho State (their computer security and accounting programs are top-top-echelon), and yet they are both BSU fans.

L