A photographer gets the feel of his picture of a hot-air balloon

When I am out on assignment for the Daily Herald or for that matter anytime I'm just out, I never know what I will come across and witness. Case in point while I was shooting a school assignment in the Elburn area in late summer. I spotted a hot-air balloon floating ever so gently over the cornfields around Hampshire with a basket full of thrill seekers.

For a brief moment, I felt what they were feeling as I drifted back to the time when I was in a balloon basket flying high over the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt.

It is quite a magical moment and what amazed me most was how quiet it was up a couple thousand feet when the chatter of the other people stopped and the roar of the flame was not causing the balloon to rise.

When my balloon operator fired up the flame, the heat though going straight up forced me back against the wall of the basket.

We took pictures of ourselves pretending to fall out of the basket. Don't ask me why.

Our landing was a little bumpy because the terrain was rough. Consider where we were: Egypt, rocks, tombs, King Tutankhamen. We survived!

Spotting the massive balloon in Hampshire brought it all back about my first person experience balloon ride in Egypt except there were no rocks this time just corn stalks.

This one was tickling the tassels of the corn and that is how I wanted it to look in the photograph, just barely hovering above them. Snap! Snap!

Then a sudden gust of wind came up and pushed the balloon further away ending my flashback and my decisive moment. Having the image in hand, I headed down the road to my next unpredictable adventure.