Because this is another long’ish read, I’m going to put the call-to-action up front . . .

What have you nailed that you thought you blew, because you’ve been doing it for a while?

Here’s the story anyway:

Jumping into the deep end of the pool seems to be my forte (that’s 4-tay, right?). The first real drug I ever did was mushroom tea. I was 12 or 13, or however old I was between the 7th and 8th grades. Someone told me to drink the “tea” from the pan on the stove. I did. Then I filled it up and boiled the shrooms again and again. Five times total. No one told me to do that. I figured it out myself. I was a smart kid.

First time I drove alone I took the boss’s car along PCH between Sunset Beach and Huntington Beach, and hit 110 mph in a cherry ’73 Cougar. With the top down. I remember the speedometer had “Speed Kills” Kroy’d over it.

Let’s move things along. Today the Blue Angels were raising hell over my house, practicing for the big shows over the weekend for Seafare. So I grabbed the 70-300mm lens and D700, and headed outside.

I’ve only used that lens one time, and I shot breasts. Breasts in a pink sweater, and long beautiful hair and beautiful blue eyes. None of that moved much, but I still recognized how hard it was to keep the camera still enough to avoid taking a blurry shot. Any lens movement while zoomed in tighter than 100mm and it all falls to hell.

The jets flew high or low. When they were high, they were just dots in the sky, and when they were low I had maybe a full second warning before they screamed overhead, right over my house. (And talk about loud. I was meeting with a contractor measuring my yard at one point today, and when the jets flew by I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, though he kept talking. I only have one working ear, but even with donkey ears I wouldn’t have heard a word.)

So there I was in the deep end again, shooting screaming jets over my house with a heavy zoomy shaky lens on a heavy camera. As much as I could tell from the little screen on the back of the camera, the shots were out of focus, out of frame, or both. I monkeyed with this setting and jostled with that doohicky trying to get control of it. Then my phone rang.

Becca doesn’t call too frequently. My sister’s busy with four kids and a screaming photography business of her own, so I answered while listening to the sound of the jets as the noise bounced and echoed up and down the street. I couldn’t tell where they were. Becca asked me for a friend’s number, and just then the birds came in at about the perfect height, and not too fast – four of them in perfect formation right over my head.

Not meaning to be rude, I kept the phone to my ear. But naturally I raised the camera and started shooting. The camera was heavy, the birds were moving, I was moving, the lens was moving . . . everything was in motion. It was shitbiscuits.

As the jets moved away, I could hear my sister’s voice again over the phone. “What the hell is that!?” she was saying.

I turned and my neighbor, who’d been shooting pictures of his own, asked, “Did you get any good shots?”

You know, people used to ask that in the days of film, and I never figured that out. “Did you get any good shots?” It’s bad luck to assume you did before processing the images. I can understand it with digitals, but I still shrug when I hear it, knowing that the true test happens on the computer screen.

Immediately after taking the shots, I didn’t remember taking the shots. That happens sometimes, like when you’re laying down a line on a cute girl in a bar, and half way through it goes bad. With nothing to lose you just throw out some crap and walk away not caring what you did. I bragged a little to my neighbor about nailing it, but honestly had no idea.

I didn’t even run inside to check on the computer. Instead I sulked into the house feeling defeated, and got back to work on another project. A couple hours later, I looked through the images.

Bang pow I’m tired here are the best few of them good night.

Click on them to see the whole image.