When Life gives you Lemons......

There's a phrase my old photo instructor used for photographs like this. He called them Happy Accidents. It's what happens when you totally blow a shot and the result is so bad it's good..or at least interesting.

So there I was at Bosque Del Apache for the first time. I rolled into Socorro, New Mexico around 3:30 pm on Sunday, dropped my wife off at the hotel, and headed south to scout the refuge and find my sunset shot and a location for sunrise on Monday. Photographically it was a great afternoon. I made some great images of the Sandhill Cranes in a couple of different locations and checked out the Flight Deck where I would be Monday morning to photograph the Blast Off of geese. All set, I got back to the hotel around 6:30 and we found a great place for supper where we had the best meal of this trip. There's more to that but it's another blog topic for another time. Back to the shoot.

Monday morning I pulled into the refuge about 6:15am which I felt would give me time to set up and capture the "magic light" that starts about 30 minutes before the sun breaks the horizon and catch the blast off at sunrise. My plan was to catch the fly out of the geese then hop in the car and head over to the crane pools for the crane fly out. (I'd been told they like to sleep in a bit more than the geese) I was in position to shoot, just waiting for the sun when the *)^%*) geese decided to ruin things by blasting off early. They left at least 20 minutes before I planned on shooting! Inconsiderate creatures!

So, Bill, how did you handle the situation? No sweat. I had my camera set up and pointed in the right direction so I hit the "on" switch and fired off a 10 shot burst. I knew it was too dark for anything to be even remotely in focus but I fired the shutter anyway. And what you see above is the result. Kinda quirky, kinda abstract. I like it. But there's no doubt it was the epitome of a Happy Accident.