The One That Got Away

Taking photos of nature can be a bit like fishing.  If everything doesn't come together or just right you'll be sitting there with the proverbial empty hook or perhaps even worse, you'll glimpse greatness with that shot that could have been.  Like that fish that slips the hook while fishing, once a photo opportunity is gone it's generally gone for good.

Today, I had that experience.  I took a once in a lifetime closeup of a great blue heron coasting over the Pascagoula River.  He was beautiful, graceful and powerful.  That photo was the best opportunity I've ever had to capture a heron in flight.  I was elevated, he was camera level, not far from me, and lighting was great.  I saw him coming and almost faster than I could track he was in the view finder and in a beautiful frame.  I depressed the shutter-release. Click.  Life was golden.


THEN, I got out of the bright mid-day sun and back to where I could see the lcd screen.  Oh, the humanity... In my haste I had not checked my camera settings and the camera had been knocked into a strange conglomeration of settings I never use.  


I knew it was no good. I could just tell just from that three inch square on the back of the camera.  There wasn't even anything there that I could fix on the computer.  It was just hopeless.  Oh, I tried but it was a lost cause from the beginning.  The above photo is part of the same series of shots, the heron perching on a pier.  Of course, the settings were wrong for all of the photos.

Tres tragique!  

They are all beyond repair.  It would have been an amazing photo.