Photo Post: What Woke Me Up

There was this noise. It brought me from sleep into that state between asleep and awake in which your brain does odd things in order to explain unusual sensory input. For a while my iPad was intermittently on fire. As reality seeped in, things gradually got saner: a scooter being revved on top of a local garage; a man mowing his lawn at 7am in such a way as to deliberately disturb my sleep.

Then, at about the time that Emma leapt out of bed and headed for the window, it hit me too. It was this:

My first thought was "wow!" My second was "shit, I don't know where my camera is!" My third thought was "yes you do, you silly bugger: it's by your bed." I did my best to verbalise these thoughts, but still being in the asleep-awake transitional phase it was gibberish by the time it came out. Emma, in the same state, obviously had trouble parsing the information, and her response was equally garbled.

The noise we heard, as if you hadn't already worked it out, was the sound of the red balloon's flame being fired. That's how close it was!

I'm quite proud of this shot, having captured the flame in action. I realise these shots are a bit grainy, and I realise that's because I'm using too high an ISO- I just didn't have time to change it, and I don't think I did badly considering the fact that my usual asleep-awake transitional period is best spent confined to duvet as it is, at the best of times, an experience that would make the music videos for Beatles songs look a bit normal.

There wasn't a lot of time before the balloons slipped behind the chimney pots. I would have liked a bit more time to focus and frame the shots (as well as change the flippin' ISO), but it really was a case of point, shoot, sort it out in the crop. Some post-production lightening was necessary, too.

There are a couple more pics from this set on flickr, but they're not all that.