Japan - Temple Life, Wedding Procession #2

In a stroke of incredible luck, I managed to capture the exact moment that caught the profile of the bride's face when she was either accepting or giving a handkerchief to the lady dressed in black...something I didn't even observe until working in post-capture.  The shot is cropped so the boundaries of the doorway are more visible in this shot as well.

I used the work luck, but reservedly because luck is such a conditional term.  There are two things that, in my case, greatly increase the chances of capturing those "lucky" shots: volume and hard work.

Volume in that I always have my rig handy when on a trip and during special occasions, and have it set in burst mode at four frames per second.  Knowing that it's there all the time, if there is a single shot I want to capture I release immediately after the first click.  In a case such as what you see in the shot above, when there is motion and predictability, I kept the shutter down in burst as the procession approached this position.  Subsequently, in post-capture I was able to select which frame was the best from all the frames captured.  After a trip/occasion, upon sitting down for the first cull, typically a majority are thrown away - about two thirds.  From those a very small minority are what can be called "keepers".  Even fewer from among that batch are what I consider to be blogworthy - that is, good enough to share with the world.  So from among about 200,000 pictures taken since 2002, a tiny fraction of one percent are here for all to see.

Hard work in that I consider it intellectually stimulating to learn a program like Photoshop or Lightroom so that the best possible image can result, and don't mind spending a bit of time with it.  It's relaxing for me to sit down, look at an image on the computer, and adjust or tweak it to achieve a pleasing result.  The digital darkroom makes that process so much simpler and diverse that the sky is really the limit in what you can create.  And this in record time!  I am old enough to remember the days when everything was done in a chemical/analog darkroom, when you couldn't see the results of your work until after a laborious (and smelly) process, which had to be done all over again if it didn't work.  Now that whole business can be accomplished in mere seconds and reversed if necessary, ad infinitum.


Anyone can do this, and you don't need an array of expensive equipment to achieve good results.