Saturday, August 14, 2010

Missed it by *that* much



  On rare occasions, when I get a particularly good shot for my 365 photo blog, people will ask me, "How did you do that?" Usually, these are shots where something is frozen in space, and they take a really precise sense of timing. I'm not one of those photog fellas who can afford the fancy movement or sound triggered shutter mechanisms. I do it by pure reaction time.
  Most of the time, this works, and I get very lucky. Examples can be found here, here and particularly, here.
  And then there are days such as today. I had a VERY old bottle of champagne, well past its prime, and I decided I would Christen a patch of cement with it. Like the light bulb shot, this was a one-shot deal. After carefully setting everything up and Saran-wrapping my camera, I grabbed the trigger and "Bombs away!"
  As you can see in the picture above, I missed it. This is literally the moment of impact. At the highest resolution, I can see a crack just beginning to form as the bottle strikes the ground. If I had been about 1/4 of a second later with my trigger, I would have caught it. Unfortunate. So, today's picture over at 365 is some broken glass and wet cement. Not nearly as exciting.
  Just goes to illustrate that for every stunner shot I get, there are many, many failed attempts such as this. My eye is still sore from dripping Visine in it eighty times or so trying to get the eye picture from last week. Actually, that was a fail, too, because I was trying to get the drop at the moment it struck the surface of my eye. I eventually gave up due to time and my eye not being able to stay open anymore.
  Much as I want them to be, they can't all be winners.



2 comments:

  1. The eye comment reminds me... how is that prostate photo you were working on coming along?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I had trouble getting the light right.

    ReplyDelete