I’m pretty happy with this one.  Particularly the flight shots at the end.  Want to know how I got them?  You’ll have to read the rest of the post! 

We had originally planned to do a few flyovers in a plane, so I was getting ready to rent a gyro stabilizer and really make sure we made the most of a few once in a lifetime shots I thought we could get from there.  I’m not 100% sure what happened, but the plane wasn’t going to work in the long run.  They ended up getting a firetruck in and put someone on the top of its 85′ foot lift with a camera (thanks Eric S.) but I knew we didn’t really have access to a lens long enough to make that work.  (The longest lens available was 200mm, which even with the added crop of the APS-C sensor wasn’t enough to make up for the distance from the event.)

So I got online 2 days before the event, and ordered a small weather balloon, went to Walmart and bought a foam pool noodle, and we even managed to track down some helium from a local auto parts store the day of the event.  I’ll update this post at some point with pictures of the actual rig, but for the short amount of time and very limited budget (the whole shot cost under $125) I think the results were decent.  I had 2 GoPro’s in the rig to do the shooting, and I they did pretty decent.   Check out the end of the video and let me know what you think about our last minute flight shots.