Hi Ya'll! Hope you've had a great week. Me? Not too bad I've been out and about taking photo's the last week or so. So I can't complain. Thanks for asking. LOL This week I want to talk about something that all photographers go through. Being on the Struggle Bus. What I mean really struggling with a shot or your camera or both. That happened to me a few days ago and I thought that I would share. It's not always Rainbows and Unicorns when we do photography and I want to share the bad and good of being a photographer. My Photography wingman Robert had an idea of a shoot. Now this could be good or bad but usually pretty good. The Weather Lady in our area was talking up the Perseids Meteor Shower that was getting ready to happen. Along with no moon this was an opportunity to take. So he planned a trip to Bodie Island Lighthouse that is a good drive from our little town to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But that was Okay. Any excuse to go and take photo's is a good one as far as I'm concerned. Along the way is Alligator River Wildlife Refuge and we decided to take a quick drive through to see if we could see some wildlife and photograph. Neither one of us is a wildlife photographer so if we
saw anything that would be a plus. I was all in. Robert took the day off and we decided to get a hotel because it would be so late when we finished and being tired and driving at night especially through this part of rural North Carolina can be dangerous with small roads and deer crossings. We have had club members that have hit deer and we even had a deer encounter when we did our New Years shoot this year when a deer ran into the side of our car. But luckily the deer or the car didn't sustain much damage. So we were all set. I got my gear together and I had a plan. I was going to test my new travel kit against my full frame setup and see how they compared. 

We took off early afternoon and headed to the coast. We always have interesting conversations when we travel that can range from photography to music to movies almost anything and a lot of Dad Jokes. It was a very hot day as most of the days have been lately. We arrived at Alligator River Wildlife Refuge after a couple of hours drive and got out our cameras and started driving the gravel roads. We came to our first intersection and there was a truck parked there. We pulled up beside and in the distance on the road I could see a momma bear and her cubs playing. They were out of reach for my 100 to 400 full frame equivalent lens. We talked to the guy beside us and he said that about 30 yards in front of us just off the road there was another bear. We couldn't see him at first but after a few minutes he meandered out onto the road. Looked at us and started down the road away from us stopping to look around poop and do bear things. I was snapping away. I was still sitting in the car and was shooting through the windshield . Robert was out of the car shooting. We shot until he slipped into the brush again. Well that was easy we were thinking. I had my camera set on one of my custom settings on my new Sony A6700 set for wildlife .  Hard to tell by the back of the camera how good the images really were but we were happy. We came saw a bear within 15 minutes took the photos and were on our way. Job well done ! Well that's what I thought. When we finally got home I downloaded the photo's to the computer imported the images and started looking at them. They were soft. And they were shot in JPEG not RAW so I couldn't put them through image sharping software to try to recover them. So I had a lot of out of focus images of a bear. When using a new camera . Even if you've got things set up double check. I didn't. I would have got better shots if I had got out of the car also. I was shooting through the windshield over the hood of a very hot car and I'm sure the heat waves were coming off of the hood giving me soft photo's. My camera was tracking the bear using AI focusing but I think shooting over that hood and through a tented windshield got the best of me. Lesson Learned.

After that shoot we went the rest of the way and made it to our hotel where we checked in. It was still to early to go to the Lighthouse so we decided to go eat then go to the lighthouse. While on the way we forgot to pick up some waters or Gatorade or something and after we were there we were and it was too far to just go for a drink. We pulled out our phones and figured where the best place would be to see the meteors and we set up. There were lots of people there and it wasn't dark yet. We wanted to get some blue hour shots and then wait for the meteors to shoot them and then do a composite photo with the lighthouse from blue hour and all the meteors from later in the night. Well we wert the only ones that saw the new about the meteor shower and lots of people showed up and kept showing up through the night. That meant car lights that shown across the lighthouse. And people everywhere with flashlights walking right in front of you. It was very frustrating trying to get a shot without noise pollution from some car or person. To make things even worse the mosquitoes were very hungry and swarming. I put on a long sleeve shirt and a head net and they were relentless and hungry. They feasted on us. Today is about a day and a half after the shoot and I am very itchy and have lots of bites on my legs. Robert is the same. So that added to the frustration of the people and all of the light pollution. About 1030 or so we decided to pack it up and go to another location. We went to a beach which is really just across from the lighthouse can't remember the name but it was much nicer there. The mosquitoes were almost non existent compared to the lighthouse. We took some shots toward the ocean and you could see when the waves crashed the florescent things in the water that made the waves glow. Very cool. I was having problems focusing. I was watching Robert dial in his focus but I couldn't get mine going. I know it was a setting . So I just focus on a light at the shower house and used that to do a hyper focus shots. I tried to look for stuff in the menus but they are so big I couldn't find stuff and I was really on the struggle bus. My camera seemed to be working good but I couldn't see what I was doing on the screen. What I had forgot to do was go over all of the things I would need to do for astro photography. And I forgot some steps and settings that would have made it super easy. Luckily I did get a couple of shots of the milky way that are decently sharp. So after the shots from the Wildlife Refuge and the lighthouse and the beach I had a handful of good shots and a lot of mosquito bites.

The next morning we headed to a restaurant that we have been to before and had a good breakfast. We then went to Plymouth NC and walked around the town taking photo's . I was finally in my wheel house and got more keepers than the last two places we went. What's the moral to this story? Prepare and check settings before going out on a shoot. It's not just the gear list you need to check its the "how to do" stuff that you need to check on. Thats where I failed. I didn't double check my settings I didn't go over procedures to focus when doing astro photography. I've only got a few shots to show for a full 24 hours of shooting. It happens to the best of us and I'm no exception. It was a good lesson learned but I still had a great time being out and shooting. Even though I don't have anything to show for it. So until next week! Get out and Shoot! 

Hey if you want to check out my photography go to my instagram account Max Stansell Photography there are over 2000 posts there. Here is the link

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