A Christmas Gift...

....from Tom, who got this for me after I was showing him pictures of one being used on blip. Believe it or not, it's 47 degrees F here--a spring day in the middle of winter--so being too nice a day to waste inside, we went to Seminary Woods to try out my gift. We spent a lot of time laughing at my attempts; I started out tucking the ball in some branches of a young tree; I thought it was secure so turned around to get my camera from my wingman, only to have him dart around me and save the ball as the tree branches slowly bent to the side & the ball was making its escape! I tried another tree, which worked better! Then I laid the ball on a fallen log (of which there are many) and was trying to decide what would be the best angle--somewhere that I didn't show up in the reflection, and where I didn't get big splotches of sun--took me awhile, and after taking a picture, Tom asked me if I'd noticed that the log was smoking!! Sure enough, an area of the log where the rays of sun were going through the glass had a tiny wisp of steam coming up. Thank goodness everything in there is wet! Then another photographer came walking through and asked what we were doing--Tom told him we were playing with big marbles...or maybe losing them! A nice guy, who we ran into again on our way out. He had a huge long lens on his camera, and said he'd been photographing the owls.......What owls, we asked? So he told us where to find them and said they're always in that area, so if tomorrow is sunny, we'll go back & look for them, as I'd only brought my macro lens with me. Seeing as how I had 11 extras left at the end of last year, I'm living dangerously and using two of my extras already. A couple more of my attempts, both of which I flipped upside down (so they'd look right side up), as I liked them better that way.    :)))