Momentary Awe | Travel photography blog

While we’re on a desert theme, I thought I’ll keep this post on the same lines with an image taken during a recent balloon trip taken over the desert close to Al Ain (a city in the UAE). I’ve been in a balloon a couple of times before, but this one was a little bit different.

If you’re not familiar with balloons, the way you navigate with them is by climbing or descending to take advantage of the different wind directions. Well, the day we flew there was almost no wind at all altitudes. We even got permission to climb all the way to 6000 feet (the usual altitude at which the balloons here go is 4000 feet) and we still didn’t find any wind. After about an hour, when the time came to land we started descending slowly hoping to land very close to where we started. As we reached 300 feet the wind showed up, pushing us towards one of the Sheikh palaces where the pilot made it clear that it would be a bad idea to try and land. If we did, the pilot would either get his license taken away or we would all get offered tea and dates. Although some tea and dates sounded very good at that particular point, we didn’t want to risk it! So the pilot decided to go for a bit of a harder landing. Now, harder landings with balloons mean that the basket gets pushed to its side, which is exactly what happen to us (I’ve posted an image in the behind the scenes section of the Facebook page).

As for the image below, it was taken while we were on our way down passing over an apparently popular place for cars to get off the road.

Shot with NIKON D300S | 62mm | ƒ/8

This last Friday I did something I haven’t done in quite a while (almost 3 years to be exact). Taking my car in the desert for some dune bashing. We tried a new route this time somewhere at the back of the mountains that surround Hatta and it was a really enjoyable day out. As opposed to the usual dune bashing places in Dubai (mainly the big red), this place was serene! We didn’t see even one car the whole time we were in the dunes and to top it all off the mountains were always in the background.

I didn’t take many photos with my DSLR because I was preoccupied with a new experiment. I strapped a GoPro HD camera on the top of my car doing both a timelapse and filming some HD footage. The result looks great (a little bit like a first person shooter in the desert) and I will soon share it with you.

Shot with NIKON D300S | 70mm | ƒ/4