It's Raining Balls...

One of the joys of living close to one of East Lothian's major tourist attractions, East Links Famiy Park is that whenever family descend upon us in the shape of primary age grandchildren, there is an inevitable trip to East Links. For the sake of those not in the know, it is a small pet farm that has expanded in to a major draw for young children because of the range of its attractions. This time it was the turn of my grandchildren from Berlin. It was a cold and windy day so the park was practically deserted most of the day so we could spend as long as we wanted at our favourite attractions. This afternoon we spent almost an hour in the blast ball room where children can shoot soft balls from cannons and send them flying into the air on streams of air. There is a net in the middle of the ceiling in which you can collect a load of the balls and with the yank of a rope handle you can send them pouring down. It takes a while to fill this net with balls so we only had a couple of attempts to get this right and shower the boys with coloured balls.

Photographically it presents a major challenge as the roof light blast in bright light whilst the room itself is in general low light. I have got round this by using HDR and putting a neutral sky in the blown highlights of the roof lights. A high speed sequence of shots enabled me to choose whichever I thought was most effective from the point of view of the falling balls.