Vacation Wrap Up Part II

I took a ton of photos while on vacation. At last count I had over fourteen hundred of them. Now obviously I don't have over fourteen hundred great photos. I probably have three. But you would think with that many that I must have had my camera glued to my hand, ready and waiting at all times. Well, this post is more about the things I didn't get. The ones I missed. Sometimes by a fraction of a second, sometimes by a mile. Either way, things I have no proof that I saw while on vacation.

I didn't get a picture of the bald eagle that flew incredibly close to the ground while we were driving. I certainly saw it in plenty of time to get a fantastic picture of it. But I was way too busy gawking and the conversation went like this...

Mirth: Oh my god! It's a bald eagle! Can you believe that's a bald eagle? I've never seen a real live bald eagle actually flying before! That's so incredible! A bald eagle! Mister C, did you see the bald eagle?"

Mister C: No. Did you get a picture?

Mirth: Oh shit! I should have taken a picture of it. Where's my camera? Where's the eagle? Dammit!

I was switching back and forth between lenses a lot depending on where we were so sometimes what should have been an incredible photo op turned out less than stellar. Like when I used my telephoto lens to take pictures of things that were relatively close because that's what was on the camera when the opportunity arose. Like this...



My he has lovely muscle tone in his butt.

Sometimes Mister C touched things on my camera and then claimed he didn't. Like when I handed him my camera to take some picture out the driver's side window. When he gave it back it took me an hour to put it back to rights and in the meantime all my shots look like this...



I'm still not sure what he did but somehow the auto-focus was all out of whack, the camera was suddenly deciding depth of field and the all the pictures had a dreamy, ethereal feel to them that I wasn't looking for. After pushing different buttons in different orders and eventually setting it back to the factory settings and starting over, I got it back to normal. For his part, Mister C still claims all he did was take the picture. Mmmhmm.

Then there was this shot...



If you close one eye, squint the other, turn your head 98 degrees to the left, stand 100 yards away from your screen and pretend real hard you can see the mountain goat that jumped into the woods. Literally five seconds prior to this magnificent picture, that mountain goat was standing in the middle of the road as we came around a corner. Just standing there, waiting for us. And in the time it took me to scoop my camera off the floor at my feet and take the lens cover off while simultaneously pushing the button to make the window go down the damn goat took off running into the woods. Sigh.