Great question, @blessingscaptured! I do think it was time of day/lighting, and then popping up vibrance in editing. I took them around 10am.
I’m pretty sure the main components that helped were:
– Blue sky (not too many clouds, and not golden hour or sunrise/set)
– The sun being decently high in the sky actually gave a bit of backlight to the balloons. I was just realizing that golden hour light would be more sidelight if I’m shooting from the ground towards the sky, whereas you’d be getting a little more back/side light earlier in the day, shooting from that perspective. The harsh lighting is almost a good thing in this setting, I guess!
– I had to decrease the exposure a bit in post-processing. I discovered I overexposed too much in camera, which made the colors look really strange, so pulled back on exposure in editing. I’ve attached a screenshot with before/after and panel with my edits, for an example.
– Pulled up vibrance a lot higher than I normally would. I really edited these photos more to an extreme than I do for most photos than I take, but it really worked for this scenario 🙂
