Photography Story of the Week

The time is 11:45pm. Everyone in the house is asleep: Everyone except me. I’d been tossing and turning for over an hour. Relentless thoughts and musings bounced around inside my head like cerebral racquetballs; refusing to let me sleep.
As is my usual custom under said circumstances, I rose from my bed to get a small snack in an attempt to direct some blood flow away from my overactive brain. As I walked into the kitchen, I noticed that there was a very thick fog layer outside. The fog had an eerie look as it floated and swirled among the trees. I thought to myself, “that would make a really cool long-exposure picture”, but then decided that going out into 25degree rainy, foggy weather at 11:45 at night probably isn’t the smartest thing in the world (besides the fact that the picture probably wouldn’t even turn out). So I grabbed my slice of turkey and my string cheese and went back to bed.
The racquetballs continued to bounce, but now they were the shape of awesome long-exposure fog pictures taken in the middle of the night. They bounced around mercilessly for 5 minutes until the next thing I knew was that I was putting fresh batteries into my camera and grabbing my tripod.
Now, I tend to be a bit scatterbrained even on a good day. So get me at 11:45 at night after a really long day, and after having my cerebral cortex pummeled into grey jelly by nagging photo-ops for five minutes, and you may not recognize me. I say all that to say that I went outside in my pajamas, namely: my black Pony basketball shorts. I didn’t even attempt to find my sandals in the dark house. To amplify the stupidity of my mistake (the mistake being marching out into the 25degree darkness two-thirds naked), I decided that I should go out the back door since the front door squeaks really loud. This added about another 150 feet to my hike. That was dumb.
My whole body shook as I grasped the door knob that led to the world that could potentially be the death of me, but could also herald in my fame with an award-winning image of trees with an eerie fog floating about them. I opened the door and was greeted by the brisk (no, biting) air outside. As I fought my way through the icy rain and wind, it was all I could do to keep from giving up: I HAD to make it. I just had to!
I finally made it to ground zero and set up my tripod. As I bent over to tighten the legs, our gutter decided that now would be a fun time to leak a half-gallon of nasty, icy cold water down my shorts. As I recovered from the shock, I quickly got my mind back to the task at hand. I could NOT let myself get distracted. I ran a test exposure at 30seconds to check the lighting: way underexposed. Now things were getting tricky. I set my focus to infinity, and then used my trusty roll of electrical tape (which I accidentally stole from Luke… sorry, man.) to tape down the shutter release on BULB mode. Once the ten second time elapsed, the grand wait commenced: 1…2…3…4…5…6…7...8...9…10…11- all the way up to 97seconds. I have a setting on my camera that reduces noise on long exposures which takes as long as the exposure. So as my camera was rendering the image, I quickly ran towards the house, camera and tripod in hand. By the time I got to the house, my camera had finished rendering the image! I quickly clicked the preview button to view my newly created digital masterpiece.

The real name for this post is actually DEPRESSING Photography Story of the Week, for my image was completely out of focus, looked like it had been taken in the middle of the day, and the fog was nowhere to be seen. My guess is that the exposure was so long that the fog just disappeared because of motion blur.

I deleted the picture and crawled into bed. Now the words EPIC FAILURE were bouncing around inside the masses of grey-matter encapsulated in my skull.

ah well… it made for an entertaining story.

The moral of this story? Follow your first instinct, shove the turkey and cheese in your mouth, and go to bed.

~josh

hahahhaa.
I thoroughly enjoyed that.
Though slightly depressing...most entertaining and i think worth the story.

Heheheheh. Very good story, even though it is a little depressing.
At least we all learned something from it.

Glad you enjoyed it! A lot of people don't like my writing style; "too conversational". lol I guess that works for a forum.

~josh

I like your style of writing.


and i have to say...this story saved me yesterday night. I woke up at like 2am and looked outside...and the snow looked AMAZING. I was superbly tempted to go get my camera and tripod and take some pictures. (it would have had to be a slow shutter cuz it was still dark even with the snow). Then I remembered your story.
So I went back to bed.
I'm glad I didn't get up. haha
The snow was still there in the morning. ^_^

::laughs out loud::
Oh, wow! I can totally see you doing that. I would do it too, I suppose; so I give you 2 thumbs up!
And your writing style is so much more interesting than most. If your doing a job reseme; no. Writing a friend; yes.


Love it

::lights up:: 8D


Well, I can write more formally; I just often choose not to. :P

Clareesa wrote:I like your style of writing.

I concur. Highly entertaining. Mad skillz! lol ^_^ Thanks for sharing.

::bows::

Danke schoen mein fruend. :)