How do you get that great shot when you are only shooting some of the time?

Sometimes it’s just luck. I’ve always liked this clip of my brother bowling. I was only snapping pictures with my iPhone now and then. This time I was filming.

For every great shot I’ve captured, I’ve missed a huge amount by not having the camera in my hands. And I can’t tell you how much of my life I have wasted in trying to document a scene when I should have been simply enjoying the moment.

My steam locomotive video from 2015 is up for consideration as a Wikimedia Commons Featured Video. That’s a neat honor to be nominated. Only 153 videos have been selected as a Featured Video. That really good since this first page states there are 61,306,647 videos on Commons. The next page says, however, that only 135,000 videos exist. Whatever.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_videos (external link)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Video (external link))

How did I get that shot? Handheld and with an iPhone? I let the steam engine come to me. No walking to it or away. I stood still, letting it roll up and on.

I’m glad I didn’t have a zoom or I would have been fooling around with that. And I am glad the iPhone had enough pixels five years ago to present something worthwhile today. Here’s the candidates page along with some other fine videos:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_video_candidates (external link)

And here’s Dave making that shot.

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