Always Get Up

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have had an opportunity, both planned and spontaneous, to get up in the middle of the night and dash out for some sort of awesome photo opportunity. It is hard to say set an alarm for 2:00 am and then actually get up when it goes off. The bed is so cozy, that dream I was having was so good. Sometimes the sheer force of will needed to ignore all of that and pack up and head out into the cold night is tremendous.

My advice is still Always Get Up!!!

This particular photo was an example of the spontaneous and unplanned variety. Way back in 2005 while living in Edmonton, I was awoken at 4:00am by the sounds of deep thunder and lighting rolling through the city. For those that are born and raised here on the West Coast of Canada, you probably have no idea what I am talking about because in the many years that I have lived here in Vancouver now I have heard deep thunder a grand total of maybe 4 times (and one or two of those might have actually been a train or something). Alberta! Well Alberta gets thunderstorms! While they are probably fairly tame by Northern Ontario standards, I would say that they hold their own.

4:00 am! The middle of June and I was lying awake looking out the window at this world ending lighting thunder, and rain that was happening outside and I did as any rational sane photographer type would… I jumped up, grabbed my camera and fired on down the street to the Alberta Legislature.

It was there under the cover of an overhead walkway that I proceeded to try and take exposure after exposure after exposure of the legislature building all in the vague hopes that could perchance capture a streak of lighting in the photo. 

I stayed there snapping photos until the storm finally passed me by and the sun started to come up. I headed home with actually no idea what I may have captured. I had not even had a chance to chimp (AKA look at the photos on the screen) to see if I was getting anytime because I feared that while I was looking at the screen I would miss a shot.

It was 3.5 -8 seconds to take the exposure and then another 3.5-8 seconds for the camera to run it’s noise reduction cycle, and then another 3.5-8 seconds to write the file to the card (Digital camera’s were so much slower back then) Doing this I could take a maximin of 1.5 – 2 photos a minute all while the lighting and thunder were quickly clambering away from where I was sheltered. I was only out there for an hour before the storm had moved to far away and was replaced by the morning light.

When I got home again I popped the card in to copy to my computer and went back to bed :) I didn’t know if I had captured any thing until I was up again in the morning. I took 27 Photos and these were the only ones that came close :)

It was a crazy experience that I would have the good sense to repeat a number more times in my life, and it happened because I got up.