Plan B Forum

Knowing I'll never be this good...



Weather photographer of the year 2020 in pictures.

Well, the summer heat didn't kill the coronavirus as we were promised.  Maybe sub-zero cold will.
C'mon, Winter!!!

-"BB"-

That picture certainly presaged Winter is Coming.

Gob, I share your pain. For many years I carried in my billfold a clipping of a 'help wanted' classified ad in the Paris Herald Tribune from Black Star for a dark room worker and I knew I probably did not have enough talent to qualify for emptying the wastebaskets. I recently put up a print of 'Walk Through Paradise Garden' by W. Eugene Smith on wall in my library. Once upon a time I was shooting 25 36x cans of 35mm and about 10 rolls of 120 every month.
Processing my self in an Army hobby dark room. After 3 years of this, I had a trunk full of negatives and about 20-30 individual frames that worth printing as more than tourist snapshot records. And two of them were from the first and second rolls I ran through my new Rollie.

Our only hope is aa small scale test of the 'million monkeys with type-writers' hypothesis. Digital lets us take thousands of pictures and never spend a dime on processing equipment or materials. Just keep hitting the delete button until we once in a while manage one worth saving.

snailgate

It's funny. I still take flak from a professional photog buddy over one picture I took a few years ago. I've posted it on here, I think. Anyhow, he has all the high end gear, whereas I have a Canon Rebel with the bottom-end consumer grade 85-300 zoom. I was shooting a test session for our latest restoration on a stormy day, since I wasn't on the crew list. As were my photographer buddies. It was a big deal, getting this boat wet for the first time in 30 years and 40 years since it last ran in it's original livery.

Boat was getting pushed back to the dock after a run and the clouds looked REALLY ominous. But my 300mm zoom was too close-in and my little lens was in the truck. So I shot a couple with my cell phone just because. And caught a lightning bolt in the background. All the professional photographers with their rapid fire "read the part numbers on the spark plugs from a mile away" setups never got a single lightning bolt that day. I got one with the boat in frame, with my damn cell phone.

My buddy still asks me "catch any lightning bolts today" every time I run into him at the races.

The perfect shot takes a lifetime of waiting plus a fraction of a second of exposure.

Burning Petard wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 19, 2020 2:40 am

Gob, I share your pain.

Our only hope is a small scale test of the 'million monkeys with type-writers' hypothesis. Digital lets us take thousands of pictures and never spend a dime on processing equipment or materials. Just keep hitting the delete button until we once in a while manage one worth saving.

snailgate

Agreed. "One in a million" shots can even happen to us!

Econoline wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 19, 2020 7:00 am

The perfect shot takes a lifetime of waiting plus a fraction of a second of exposure.

In almost forty years of photography, I've been able to get one — exactly ONE — picture that I can point to with pride and say, "Yes, I took that."
The rest are just pictures and snapshots, and their only value will be that, if they survive, at some point in the future they could be used to document that something was in a certain place at a certain time and that this is what it looked like.

-"BB"-

Also, a lot depends on circumstances, too.  How rare and valuable do you think pictures of the 'RMS Titanic' would be if it HADN'T sunk?

-"BB"-