Right Place, Right Time

This is a lesson about planning, timing and giving yourself the opportunity to catch the best moments. I'm referring to photography here, but this can be applied to many areas of life and multitude of interests.

To make a great photograph, you need an interesting subject to the photo, good light, the right gear, artistic view, and the knowledge of how to put it all together. There are quite a few variables that you need to take into account, some of which you can control, and some you can't. You can set yourself up to success, and then all you need is a bit of luck to make it all come together in perfect harmony. You won't get lucky every time, or not even often, but if you control everything you can, the chances of getting THE shot greatly increase.

I can't even tell you how many times I've seen something I would have wanted to capture, but I wasn't ready to take the shot. I didn't set myself and my gear up to capture the opportunity, or worse yet, I didn't even have my camera with me. That happens and I always beat myself up about it.

For this particular scene, I did everything right beforehand, AND got lucky. I'm quite proud of this shot of the cargo ship I took in the western harbour of Hanko. Now I'm gonna tell you everything that happened so I could get the shot.

It was the last night of my trip to Hanko, and mom wanted to show me this harbour. We went there about an hour before sunset, it was really quiet and there really was nothing more than an empty parking lot and a stone wall blocking the views to the sea. I cleverly ignored the sign that said it's forbidden to climb up onto the wall, and the pictures noting of surveillance cameras. I knew I needed to be up there if I wanted to get any shots.

The view upon the Baltic sea and setting sun was pretty alright, but it was still missing something. There were no boats, no clouds, no nothing. I did like the rock wall and the huge boulder that looked like it had ripped off from the wall. I determined that the sun would be setting pretty perfectly between the rocks, so we'd have to wait until that. We went to drive around for a bit and then came back.

I originally had the 85mm lens on me, but changed it to the 50mm because I needed the wider view to fit the whole boulder on frame. Now I had the right gear, the right place, and the right time of the day. I was pretty excited and kept jumping on the wall and admiring the sunset views.

Now comes the best part, a stroke of luck.

When I was taking pictures of the boulder and the sunset, we noticed a big ass ship was starting to move in the harbour. We could only see the top of it, but knew it would be soon passing behind the boulder. Right then, everything fell into place and I got a pretty darn cool shot if you ask me. I had set myself up for success, and with a bit of luck sprinkled on top it, I got a great shot. The name of the ship was just icing on the cake.

_{I hope this GIF works here, if not, I'll delete it.}

_{I made mom come up with me to check the cool views.}

Ps. Nobody came to scold us for being up on the rock wall. "Mischief managed."