The 17th Philippine International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta In Pictures (w/ Olympus E-PL1)

February 12 08:22 2012 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

Disclaimer: No actual shots of balloons here (not much at least)

Thanks to some family affairs that we had to take care of in Angeles City last week, we were pretty much a stone’s throw away from Clarkfield, Pampanga, where The 17th Philippine International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta was taking place. On the first day of the festival (Feb 9), we found some time to check it out and take some pictures – a great opportunity to test out some of our review units and cameras. We mostly used our new Olympus E-PL1 micro 4/3 camera for high quality all-around shooting; but we also brought as a backup our trusty Canon PowerShot SX130 IS for its megazoom capabilities, as well as our Nokia N9 review unit. While all three devices hold their own as decent cameras in their own right, the Olympus was by far the most enjoyable to use with its retro styling coupled with DSLR-quality images. Feel free to have a gander at the images it produced in the gallery below. (Some post processing has been done on these including exposure, color correction & cropping – but no touchups.)

The 17th Philippine International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta In Pictures VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

And here’s a couple of shots from the Nokia N9 and the Canon SX130 just for good measure.

The Nokia N9 (left) is good for those impromptu shots, while the SX130 (right) is great for its long range

Then we took some sample videos with all three representatives – the Olympus E-PL1 comes first, then SX130, then finally the Nokia N9.

And that’s about it for our short visit to the Balloon Festival this year! Maybe we’ll be there again next year to take even more pictures – hopefully with more balloons. (Just a thought.)