Photo Tip Of The Day

Today’s Photo Tip (#197)

I have certain events during my life that I want to capture with a camera. My wedding, holidays, the birth of my daughters, their weddings, I hope the last one is a while off. You get the idea. Everyone I know has certain life events that the want to keep for future memories. There are a few events that I just want to capture because of their rarity.

One of those events is a Lunar Eclipse. This is where the moon travels through the earth’s shadow. It’s not an event that happens all that often. So you would expect that I would have put a lot of time and effort into the planning and execution of my plan? Nope. I was sitting down watching the weather when the weatherman says that it’s about to happen. I grab the iPhone and check when the moon is scheduled to rise. I quickly Google the expected timing of the eclipse. Where I live it was due to pass into the earth’s shadow just after moonrise. 20 minutes from now.

I live about 10 minutes from the beach, with the ideal viewing platform in mind I grab the camera and my youngest daughter and off we go with 15 minutes before the eclipse was due to happen. On the way I’m already printing the images in my head. I’m going to shoot the sequence, one photo every minute, and print it as a panoramic showing all the phases. This is going to be great.

We get to the lookout and there is cloud cover as far as the eye can see. So as you can see the lack of planning had absolutely nothing to do with the failure of the project. The theory, perfect. The execution, flawless. The weather, a big failure but not my fault, it could have been clear skies. Will I let this project die? Nope. I plan to check out when the next Lunar Eclipse is likely to happen. I will succeed…..eventually.

You might be wondering at this point what about the tip. Is your camera ready to grab at a seconds notice? Do you know your local area well enough to drop everything and get to the best spot to shoot from? Do you have the knowledge to check for certain information on your computer or iPhone. Can you plan the final print in less time than it takes for you to arrive at your destination and know how you need to shoot it? That’s the tip. Have your camera ready for anything. Be confident in your ability to forward plan. Get to know your local area better. Have an idea how you want the final print to look like before you fire a shot in anger. Be ready.

Merry Christmas & Happy Shooting

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