When you go out to get a photograph, there are two ways you can set out. Prepared and unprepared. When I was in Basic Combat Training (Basic for short) I heard all about the “7Ps.” At the time, I thought it was just my instructors being, well – you know….difficult.

Full entry at TWIPPhoto.com.

This was illustrated in a most exquisite photography FAIL of mine at my fiancee’s MBA graduation.

Accomplished Checklist:

• Camera battery fully charged
• Flash batteries fully charged
• Perfect framing, focus and light settings from where I was sitting.

Things that should have been added:

• Knowing she would be graduating from the management college instead of the business college like I’d assumed. 10 seconds of research in the graduation pamphlet would have told me this.
• Paying attention when the correct college for her graduation was called to the stage so that I would have noticed she was the second person in line, and not in alphabetical order.
• Leaving the flash and camera ON so I could wake it from sleep mode and get the shot, instead of fumbling through “OMG WHY WONT ANYTHING WORK?!”
• Zooming out first (70-300mm lens) so I could find her quickly on stage and zoom in to quickly frame, instead of trying to find her with a super-zoomed-in 1-person-at-a-time frame.

So yeah, lack of proper prior preparation resulted in piss poor performance. I missed the shot which would have looked great framed next to her diploma. For me, heartbreaking; for her (luckily) a funny story of what a camera geek I am.

And to think, before all of this I was kicking myself for not bringing my Canon 70-200 f2.8L because I thought I’d need the extra reach of the crap Quantaray 70-300. Everyone’s said it a million times, the best gear in the world doesn’t matter when you miss the shot.

Lesson = learned!