you all know now that last night,
@northy and i invaded the castle grounds to shoot ghosts. i wanted to capture a silhouette or ghostly apparition of a person wearing a hat and long coat so i pulled my long winter coat from the back of the closet, wore dress pants and my office winter boots. oh, and i brought with me little darren's big man hat.
the front entrance was well lit up by that big fixture and the large wooden door would be perfect. as we were setting up our tripods, a man came out to smoke but ignored us so we continued with what we're doing. with the set up ready, i couldn't make my remote shutter to work (that's another long story but stay with me on this one first). not a problem, i switched to the self-timer. i have not used the canon so much and i'm one who's so not inclined to reading the manual of anything. i live some parts of my life through trial and error.
the next problem was, where we set up, we wanted to get the ambience of the castle so we had to shoot wide. which means farther away from the castle's front entrance. which means i need to run to get to the door steps inside of that 10-second self-timer. which i did, but i ran like a girl so i couldn't make it in time, because i wasn't sure if the ground was slippery; it was wet from the snow that had melted during the day and sometimes the wet becomes icy in the cool breeze of the evening. heck, you repeat the process about three times, the fourth time, i really really wanted to just vault over that arched ledge in front to get to the steps before the darn timer runs out. my problem was the darn long coat. now, i'm maybe stubborn as a mule but i'm no dummy. if i jump over that ledge wearing long coat and i'd be pretty sure to hurt myself.
we were basically doing that, or mostly just me - northy was so together she largely ignored my mumblings. then during the course of our activity, more people were coming out for a smoke. at first they were polite, begging my pardon, asking if they interfered with the shot, etc. etc. after sometime they largely ignored us and they didn't care if they were in the frame or in my way or something.
okay, i lost my trend of thought so can i just finish this up by telling you that at the end, when my camera had started to give me a warning that the battery was going to die soon, that's when i figured that the remote wouldn't work because i didn't attach the camera-to-remote cable. and then when we took a break to change batteries, guess what? i brought the spare battery for my nikon!
i make a pretty good ghost though, don't i?
but can you spot northy on this shot? :-)
@salza - it is! thank you, sally.
@aecasey - thank you, april.
@leananiemand - thank you, leana.
@claireuk - thank you, claire.
@678tabby - yup! that's the hatted head of the great northy! thank you, june.
@deburahiru - thank you, deb.
@luvmynynix - thank you, laurie.