One of the challenges for me about outdoor photography -- I’m speaking here only about the way I seem to practice it -- is that it is such an Action Sport. My friends and I are out, usually for just a day, and we are trekking through an environment, hoping to cover x-number of miles and climb or descend x-thousand feet of elevation to reach a summit or a ridge-top or a canyon bottom.
To paraphrase Robert Frost, we have “promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep.”
So there we are, my friends and I, moving, moving, moving.
Then I see something, the possibility of an image: There is great light, or wonderful clouds are forming, or whatever.
And so I say to the group: “You all keep going. I’m going to take a picture. I’ll catch up.”
Sometimes the image is such that I can shoot quickly. I pull my camera from the case I have strapped to my chest. I happen to have the right lens on. I make a few exposures. I pack the camera back in its pouch and double-time it back toward my companions.
Occasionally, though, a scene is technically more demanding and a tripod must be set up; or a complicated exposure made; or the light is changing and I need to wait and see what Nature has up her sleeve. I need to take some time, but meanwhile, the group heads off into the distance.
The day I made the two photographs you see posted here, there was a third image -- one that required a tripod -- but that particular visual circumstance presented itself at the end of the day, and it was getting dark. Finding our way by headlamp through the forest we were in was not going to be easy. We needed to keep moving. And so I missed a picture that I would have liked to have made.
“The one that got away...”
Oh, that does make me crazy.
