The immense initial velocity required is about 25,000 mph (7 miles every second.)

My photography is better than my rocketry.

Universal law of gravitation: F = Gm1m2/r^2, where F is the force due to gravity, between two masses (m1 and m2), which are a distance r apart; G is the gravitational constant.

Gravitational pull is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two bodies. If your ball goes far enough, the pull from earth continues to exist, but is negligible to other forces (planets, suns, et al) acting on the ball. So the ball does not return.

In physics, Force = Mass * Acceleration, or for your question, Acceleration = Force/Mass. Force is provided by your rocket's engines, Mass is the total weight of the rocket structure (propellant tanks, engines, etc.), remaining fuel, and the payload at any point in time.

To leave the earth's surface, you need to:
a) overcome earth's gravity just to leave the launch pad, then
b) get beyond the atmosphere (source of drag) and gaining sufficient velocity to stay up (either into orbit or escape velocity.)

The more time you spend gaining velocity to get to orbital velocity (slow acceleration) the more fuel you burn doing nothing but holding off earth's gravity, which means you need more fuel, which means you have more mass, which means you need still more fuel to lift the additional mass, which means...

The 2018 SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket weighed 13,000 pounds to launch a 2,900 pound Tesla into solar orbit. That is 78% rocket and 22% payload. The Apollo moon mission were 99% rocket / 1% payload.

Additionally, you also need to take into consideration air resistance as the rocket leaves the atmosphere (go slow where the air is thickest at sea level, and faster as the air thins higher up.) Some rockets have to reduce their thrust as their speed increases to minimize the maximum aerodynamic drag (saves weight by not having to make the rocket as strong), then increase thrust again as the atmosphere continues to thin. See "Max Q."

Interesting note on the slow-but-steady acceleration front: they are running experiments using a solar sail for propulsion. The net acceleration observed is comparable to the weight of a paper clip, but you don't have to carry any fuel (pressure from sunlight provides the push.) Once you are in orbit, the small acceleration strategy becomes possible. Check out the Solar Sail project: http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/lightsail-solar-sailing/lightsail-mission-control.html

Canon user here. For my camera, those areas are overexposed (you see a white sky instead of blue sky, for instance.) Check your photo's histogram. If you see a sharp peak against the right edge, then you lost information because the sensor saturated, and could not capture the areas that are too bright. Likewise, a spike on the left edge indicates there are areas that are underexposed.

Think of the blinking areas as an error message. Typically, I end up over-exposing the sky while concentrating on properly exposing the subject. I now take a few properly exposed shots of mostly or only sky (same general time and angle to the sun), then use post processing to replace the sky in my subject photo.

You can also build up a library of nice sky photos, and use these idealized sky images to insert dramatic or subtle clouds for an over-exposed or cloudless sky.

Another possibility is an accidental drag-n-drop when viewing files in explorer/finder. I used to work IT support and files being dragged randomly across the server was a frequent problem.