On Sunday morning I did my first ever hot air balloon ride. It involved a 3am start and a dawn take-off from Warrill View along the Cunningham Highway, approximately 30 km west of Brisbane.

Warrill View isn't spectacularly scenic, but there was a light mist on the ground to give some ambience as we took off and floated towards Mutdapilly. For the flight, I managed to get a standing space right on the corner of the basket, so I had great view and plenty of space to use the camera. Being early spring, it was still quite dry, but there was a little bit of green to give some colour to the surrounding fields and paddocks.

For the flight I used my Hasselblad X2D 100c and 25mm f/2.5 lens. I set the camera to f/11 and used an ISO between 64 and 400. I also alternated between different image ratios, changing between 645 format (4 x 3), X-Pan (65 x 24) and 1:1. One regret is that I didn't have a second lens, so I was stuck with a wide angle for the flight. A zoom would have been very handy.

After what seemed like a very quick 60 minutes, we landed in an open field and began the balloon pack up process. If you haven't had a chance to do a hot air balloon flight before, I recommend it. It is a fantastic platform for photography. It's very quiet and stable and you have the relative freedom of not having to worry about windows (just make sure you have a good strap for your camera and use it). Some of the images that I took are shown below.

Would I do it again? Certainly.