A Photography Failure

Last Wednesday I decided to take a picture of the sun every minute as it went down. I have written down the account of what happened.

I get done helping mom with supper and it’s 6:20. I grab my camera and tripod and head out the door. I’m aiming to be back in ten minutes because we have to eat supper then. I wanted to go up to the hill on our farm because you can see the sunset the best from up there. Unfortunately, there’s no four-wheeler readily available. Since the sunset is already starting to fade, I decide to run. Of course, I didn’t grab shoes or a jacket and its forty degrees outside. Brilliant, right?

I run up the (fairly big) hill in what might be a record for someone running barefoot with a camera and tripod case to hold onto. Sadly, as soon as I’m up at the top of the hill, my few tidbits of tripod set-up knowledge evade me so I scramble with it for a minute or two until I decide it’s good enough. I screw on my camera and take the first picture of the small glimmer of a sunset. I forgot to put it on sunset mode, but it’s too late now.

I’m nearby a fencerow that has a persimmon tree in it, so I decided to run through the field to see if the persimmons are ripe yet. Surely it won’t take more than a minute. Mind you, the small grain that’s coming up already has a bit of dew on it for some reason which makes it all the more freezing to my bare feet. Heh heh. Anyway, as I run along the fencerow I can’t really make out any persimmon tree in the dusk and it’s already been a minute and a half. I run back to my camera, out of breath, and find that I didn’t set the tripod up right, because the camera kind of tilted to one side. I take the next picture anyway.

As I’m waiting to take the next picture, I notice some pretty berries. I wish I could take a picture of them, but my camera can’t be moved, so I go back to the tripod and wait. Finally I take picture number three. For the next several minutes I sit beside my camera, trying to keep Maggie from bumping it over.

It’s past 6:30 now and I decided I better go back. I take two more pictures and then pack the tripod away and run back down the hill. I can either run in sharp alfalfa stubble or the gravel lane, so I zigzag back and forth until I get home, at about 6:40.

What do I have to show for all that? A few dark pictures of half a sunset.

I was aiming for a cool GIF where the sun quickly went down and then you could see the twinkling lights of the city in the distance. Instead I got a jerky, bumpy, sad GIF.

Well that failed. XD

Next time I’ll bring shoes, a jacket, some more tripod knowledge and a bit more time. 😉

So long!

I really want to walk through a drive thru sometime…