3rd Putrajaya International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta 2011

Putrajaya Hot Air Balloon Fiesta 2011

A few hours before I left Japan for Kuala Lumpur, I came across a friend's posting on Facebook about the Hot Air Balloon Fiesta in Putrajaya, Malaysia which were held from the day I returned home on 17 March 2011 to the weekend. The timing was just right for me and since I have always wanted to photograph such a beautiful event, I had decided to stay back in Kuala Lumpur area for the weekend.

It was a Saturday morning, that I woke up as early as 6am to get ready for the event, which started with Hot Air Balloon Flight from 7am to 9am.

Hot air balloons getting ready to take off at sunrise

My HDR Technique Evolution

Due to the limitation of our camera, a regular picture can only present a limited dynamic range of luminance. In other words if you want a certain part of the picture to be correctly exposed, you will lose the exposure of some other section of the picture, either underexposing or overexposing it.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It is a photography post processing technique where one takes several pictures of the same object but with different exposures and combine them into one single picture with greater dynamic range of luminance between the darkest and lightest area in the picture. This way, you get most section of your picture correctly exposed. However, it will also make the picture look fake, not real to people, because this is not how a regular picture is supposed to look like. That is why not everyone appreciate HDR photography.

Putrajaya, HDR Post-Processing in January 2011

Putrajaya, HDR Processing in September 2009

The Original Shot back in September 2009