It just takes one

Last night, a storm rolled in. Mostly lightning, and thunder that shook the house. The raw display of nature intrigued me, so I grabbed my camera, changed the setting so the shutter would stay open longer, and pressed the shutter-release button. Over and over. And over. And over. As soon as the shutter closed, I hit the button again. Until I got tired of standing outside holding my camera and pressing the button while simultaneously trying to avoid raindrops. Oh, and I started doing this at 2:41 am.

In 12 minutes, I took 183 photos.

I promptly deleted 157 of them. (Thank goodness for digital cameras!)

The majority of the photos look something like this:

Red dots = lights from the cell tower across the valley from my house.

I kept a few of those, because the pattern of the red dots intrigued or amused me. (But I’ll only share one, to spare you.) (And I cropped this one, because it mainly showed an awful lot of black.)

Another large percentage of photos? Completely black. Nothing on them. No light. No red dots. Nada. (Those I deleted.)

But a few, a tiny few, actually showed a little bit of the lightning.

Just a wee bit of lightning. Plus, the red dots make a pattern when you look at the full photo. Just click to do so.

And then, one shot, one glorious, out-of-focus photo, actually captured a full bolt of lightning.

Yeah, so I captured a lightning bolt. Yay me!

I know, you’ve seen better. Clearer. In-focus. But still, I took that photo, and I’m damn proud of it. Because I took a chance. I persevered. I didn’t give up hope. And I got one.

Of course, there’s a moral to this story (besides sharing how little I know about the actual technical bits about photography).

If you’re a writer, all you need is one agent and one publisher to say yes. If you’re looking for a job, you just need one offer. If you’re making art, you just need one person to buy (okay, you need more than one, but you know what I mean). If you’re taking photos, you just need one good one.

But if you don’t write, if you don’t send out your resume, if you don’t paint, if you don’t stand outside in a lightning storm with your camera, nothing will happen. You’ll get nothing.

So, release the fear. Stand in the rain. Write your heart out. Throw paint on canvas until you’re too tired to hold a brush. Push that button over and over and over. And you might just capture lightning.