I was thinking it would be interesting to hear some people's stories about those moments when we miss the perfect opportunity to capture something truly unique...
This happened to me recently on Christmas day. I was staying in a hostel in Puerto Lopez, Ecuador when the hostel owners' dog Spike got into a commotion outside. I had my camera with me and went out there to find Spike about to attack an opossum. There was no chance of stopping him (Spike was a little nuts), so I just sat back and tried to make adjustments to catch a perfect action shot of Mother Nature at her ugliest...
The story is in the blurb with the photo, but this was the first morning I took out my DSLR I'd just gotten and had no clue how to use. I had only had a p and s before that. I saw a heron fly onto our dock and then see me, get scared, fly off. Maybe will never have that happen again. It did have it in continuous and al servo, but they were either blurry or sharp but too much sun/over exp on head neck area as it left. This would have been gorgeous, but blurry so I put texture on it to hide it. I set a goal to learn to catch birds in flight and finally think I have it after a seagull in parking lot shoot on Sunday.
Here is the success I had this Sunday with flying birds…
Yesterday as I was walking down the street, a squirrel was standing up on two feet on a fence. I didn't have a telephoto lens attached, and by the time I got the camera out of the bag (with the wrong lens), some guy was running past and spook the squirrel. Doh!
Today, the squirrel was hanging with some crows, but I had left the telephoto lens home.
Maybe tomorrow. ;-) I'm used to either having the camera ready or missing the shot due to so many problems that come up.
@agima curious about the reason, though hesitant as it can be a sensitive topic.
@jeancarl No problem in asking. Our family photographer was busy for the day aka me. So we asked some friends to snap off some shots. They gave us the copies and I put them on a hard drive that I deleted a few weeks later oops, and the people that took the photos lost their copies and no one else at the weeding took any other photos.
It was weird, normally you could get at least one person from the 50 people we had but no,not one photo.
@agima : Oh man, that is really unfortunate... I only have one good photo of my husband and me on our wedding day as our families were somehow busy taking photos of each other - so there are hundreds of perfect couple shots of them but none of us... Well, we made it up by taking lots of pictures of ourselves during honeymoon ;).
Here's one of mine that got away: We were hiking and passed a herd of cows and one of our group said how afraid she was of cows. Just as I was telling her how harmless they are we heard a wild ringing of cowbells behind us and we turned to see two of our group running, chased by two bulls who were involved in a fight with each other and too mad to care if any humans were around. The looks on their faces were priceless but when I finally got my camera out the cows were jumping out of the frame:
@agima OUCH! Sounds like everything that could have gone wrong went wrong! Kinda reinforces the backup the backup the backup advice so many just don't do. Always worth the cost to back them up. Just heard a tutorial say to copy the pictures from the memory card to two locations before you delete them off the card. I always process them and then back them up to two places.
Took divers in at Oudekraal this morning to dive on the wreck of the het-huis-te-Kraainsteen ,but surprise surprise the bay was alive with a sardine run there were literally hundreds of seals in the water with us amongst the tens of thousands of fish...disaster my camera had a fog out ..the worst scenario for underwater photographers due to changes in land and water temps the lens fogs over in the housing,,,these pics were taken after the dive when i could remove the camera from housing and clean lens...the feeding frenzy has abated but there is still a large school of fish milling around in the shallows but the seals and the gulls are fully fed ...these divers are looking at the bodies of dead fish washing into the shallows.
In the deeper water at one point we had about 30 seals diving down at us spinning and ducking away at the last minute ...and no pics.
had to settle for the shore shot after the fact
@jeancarl Now I am a bit more carefull and have RAID and multiple back ups and multiple camera bodies and multiple cards. :)
On our wedding day the celebrant also forgot about us, the step father fell off our roof as he was trying to break in as we locked ourselves out of the house and the car keys were in the house. We ended out having the reception before the wedding while we tried to find the celebrant. We finally tied the knot some 3-4 hours late and with about 10 beers under out belts when the celebrant finally showed..... After a quick scotch she and a few tears she was right to go, and that was just the celebrant....
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The story is in the blurb with the photo, but this was the first morning I took out my DSLR I'd just gotten and had no clue how to use. I had only had a p and s before that. I saw a heron fly onto our dock and then see me, get scared, fly off. Maybe will never have that happen again. It did have it in continuous and al servo, but they were either blurry or sharp but too much sun/over exp on head neck area as it left. This would have been gorgeous, but blurry so I put texture on it to hide it. I set a goal to learn to catch birds in flight and finally think I have it after a seagull in parking lot shoot on Sunday.
Here is the success I had this Sunday with flying birds…
Today, the squirrel was hanging with some crows, but I had left the telephoto lens home.
Maybe tomorrow. ;-) I'm used to either having the camera ready or missing the shot due to so many problems that come up.
@agima curious about the reason, though hesitant as it can be a sensitive topic.
It was weird, normally you could get at least one person from the 50 people we had but no,not one photo.
Here's one of mine that got away: We were hiking and passed a herd of cows and one of our group said how afraid she was of cows. Just as I was telling her how harmless they are we heard a wild ringing of cowbells behind us and we turned to see two of our group running, chased by two bulls who were involved in a fight with each other and too mad to care if any humans were around. The looks on their faces were priceless but when I finally got my camera out the cows were jumping out of the frame:
@jannaellen I'd call them mad cows!
In the deeper water at one point we had about 30 seals diving down at us spinning and ducking away at the last minute ...and no pics.
had to settle for the shore shot after the fact
On our wedding day the celebrant also forgot about us, the step father fell off our roof as he was trying to break in as we locked ourselves out of the house and the car keys were in the house. We ended out having the reception before the wedding while we tried to find the celebrant. We finally tied the knot some 3-4 hours late and with about 10 beers under out belts when the celebrant finally showed..... After a quick scotch she and a few tears she was right to go, and that was just the celebrant....
A very interesting and laid back wedding.