raloria

As promised, here's the best of the photos I took while I was outside videotaping the neighborhood fireworks.

No, you're not seeing things. This is a peacock. He's sort of the neighborhood attraction and pet. He's been around for 5 or 6 years, I think. The story I heard from our next door neighbor, John, is that some people down the street had this peacock (& a peahen, but she's gone now). They moved out, let the birds loose, and left them behind. He's been here ever since and people on our street feed him (we used to, too, but then he quit coming around).

He hangs out in John's driveway a lot, squawking at every passing car. People will often stop their cars to stop and stare for a bit. I've heard that John might have named him Pierre, so that's what I'll call him until I hear different. :P

Anyway, when I went out to our driveway to set up my equipment, there he was. He seemed quite content to hang out with me for a while, so I snapped some photos.

I swear he's getting to where he enjoys the attention. The big ham. :P

He only squawks during the summer months when it's the mating season and his tail feathers grow out. He should quiet down around August.

He's getting quite used to people and if he thinks you have food he'll come right up to you.

You can see how big he is! That tail is really pretty, too. He's been displaying a lot. :)

That beautiful blue!

See, he was totally posing for me. I think he felt comfortable around me as the fireworks were going off.

But he soon headed off to find his perch for the night. It was getting dark, so I bet he settled down in one of the big pine trees between us and John. We hear him up there a lot in the evenings. Now you can see how long his tail is.

Okay, here are the few fireworks photos that came out. I really didn't know what I was doing and since I already had the videocamera on the tripod, I had to go handheld with the Canon DSLR.

It sorta worked. Didn't help that I was mostly guessing about what settings to use...and following a few guidelines from an online article about photographing fireworks.

The squiggling lines are because I couldn't hold the camera steady enough. But in some ways they look kinda cool like this.

These look like sparklers...except they're a few hundred feet in the air and really big.

Very artistic-looking.

The purple is always pretty.

This thing...I saw only one of these last year, this time I saw 2 or 3. I'm not sure what it is exactly, only that it goes high up in the air and hangs there, floating slowly and burning like a big, red flare like you see here. Then it slowly burns out. This one went right over me.