Balloons

I went to see my buddy Chris's hot air balloon recently. It's a very hot air balloon. This is the burner twisting light with heat.

Here's Chris riding the basket just above the treetops (which is good... flying into the trees is bad).

This is a view up into the balloon where you can see what a strawberry looks like from the inside.

And now the deflating strawberry..

And as I said earlier, sometimes all you need is a good model.

The Pond

The rain finally stopped so I spent some time out by the pond today. I started by photographing some still wet flowers.

As I wandered around the pond, these gosling emerged from the reeds

They weren't alone. They had these two chaperones steering them all around the pond.

I caught one of the parents pulling up a plant to feed to the goslings.

There was also a wood duck with a whole lot of duckings, but she didn't cooperate (photographically) by swimming out of the reeds.

Red winged blackbirds feed on the reeds and I was able to capture this one coming in for a landing.