I Heart Photography #3 - The Random, Unexpectedly Wonderful Shot

Part of the wonders of dabbling one's dry feet in the cold waters of creative photography is that you sometimes don't know when or how you suddenly fall in and make a big splash. Most of the time, you just see transient ripples on the surface that fade away and disappear as quickly as they come. The only way to keep the water moving and active is to keep making many and frequent ripples. Sooner or later, or at least once in a while, that big splash will come.

This is more or less true for me. As an amateur self-taught photography hobbyist, I depend on experience and criticism to improve my technical skills and creative eye in preserving images. For the longest time, I had my camera with me at all times like a shark's remora, ready to pounce on that suddent moment of opportunistic feeding. In my case, my camera is there so that whenever I see something that is worth remembering and sharing with everyone I know, I have something ready to capture that moment and preserve it so that other people can see what I saw and maybe share the same feeling I had.

My used-to-be frequent random shots and sharing of photos on Flickr, Facebook and this blog has often created those transient ripples, but one shot in particular created my big splash for me. Though the nature of the splash is still transient, the impact was much much bigger, which is why this shot, though random and partially unplanned, remains one of my personal favorites and my most popular shot on Flickr.

Catch the Sun, by ihsankhairir

This shot was captured while I was waiting for a taxicab in Singapore, sometime May of 2009. I was struggling to find the correct exposure settings to capture both the sky and the silhouette of my hand when I suddenly had the inspiration to try to shoot the sun through the peephole in my hand. Because I tried to not overexpose the sky by using a smaller aperture in combination with the correct gap size and distance of the focal plane from my hand, I managed to create a sparkle with sufficiently many spokes. As I mentioned before, this was partially unplanned because I did not perform any prior calculations nor was I privy to such technical knowledge prior to this shot. It was a random and unexpectedly wonderful shot, one that I almost immediately dedicated to a special someone (that someone remained anonymous in the dedication).

Creating random and unexpectedly wonderful shots like the one above is one of the many reasons why I heart photography :)

How about you? Have you had any random, unplanned shots that become your big splash?

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Other articles in the I Heart Photography series:
I Heart Photography #1
I Heart Photography #2 - My History of Photography