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ever get a lucky shot?

5 August 2008 16 Comments

I do believe in luck…but I also believe that we largely make our own luck. You might get a great shot because you were lucky, standing in the right place at the right time to capture a moment. But some force put you in that place at that moment. Something also provoked your finger to press the shutter button, so I choose to believe there is always something more involved than just “pure luck”.

Despite this belief, I still call this donut photograph my “lucky shot”. Why is it called that? It was shot in a matter of minutes, no big deal, but it gets really great response. The reason it’s called the lucky shot is because I’ve tried to identify and duplicate certain qualities about it without success. So I simply tell people I just got lucky.

One Saturday morning my stylist friend, Kate, and I had scheduled a lifestyle portfolio shoot. She pulled some things together and we met at a coffee shop with a model who was going to be the coffee shop customer. We photographed for the better part of the morning, getting some really nice photos. To be honest, though, there was nothing special about them, we didn’t break any new ground. After a while we did our round of “thank you’s” and headed back to the studio with the photo equipment.

prophotolife coffee guy Upon arriving back at the studio, Kate mentioned she’d also bought some donuts and Styrofoam cups and thought we might try something with those, an idea for a low budget food shot. She had to run soon and I was a little burned out but professional courtesy kept us going. We wanted to see it through.

She pulled a couple of inexpensive powdered donuts out of a box and plopped them onto our shooting table . I grabbed a cheap household clamp light and drug it over, just to see what I was doing. The intention was to get a good composition then bring in the “real photo lights”. Something messy like this also requires little brushes and tweezers to move loose elements around but we hadn’t pulled those out yet.

So I framed up the shot, took an exposure and…there it was. Done. Sure, I pushed things around a bit to satisfy my curiosity, but we liked how the household bulb brought out the delicate texture. We liked how the sugar naturally fell onto the table. A few things added up to making this $0.50 donut look pretty darn tasty. After a few minutes we called it a day.

Now a 16” x 20” print of the donut hangs in our hallway and it’s the image people stop and look at and say, “wow, that donut looks good enough to eat!”. It draws more response than photographs of expensive, delicately plated dishes. Viewers look right past the highly produced room set shots. There’s something so simple and easy to relate to that it triggers a response and viewers always choose to say something. We’ve created studio promotions to try and explore the visual ideas of the donut further, shooting additional photos to accompany it, with no great success. And that’s why this one is called the “lucky shot”. Do you have a lucky shot story?

16 Comments »

zulfadhli said:

Ive got one picture that I can consider lucky shot. It was a picture of birds flying in a circle and towards the sun. I was on a ferry at Marmara Sea, Turkey and just shooting birds flying. I only relies I got the shot when I arrived at my hotel. So it is the best lucky shot for me I think. You can take a look my lucky shot at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoolfadhlie/454008363/in/set-72157604948950678/

# 5 August 2008 at 1:31 am

Buffalo Rich said:

I grabbed this “lucky shot” while I was in Afghanistan as a combat correspondent in the Marines. We were on a raid high up in the mountains of the Kunar province near the Pakistan border and it had just dumped snow all over the mountain….and there we were in desert cammies. The whole set of photos from the two-day cordon were particularly striking because of this (most people don’t think Afghanistan=snow) and this photo got picked up and put on the cover of Stars and Stripes and made the pages of Newsweek, my first “big time” publication of a photo! For a military photog, it’s pretty rare to get published outside of the DOD, so I considered the whole thing pretty lucky.

http://www.nickelcitystudios.com/onthetrainshot.jpg

I’m also lucky I didn’t have the Navy seal who was behind me in this shot, assisting us in the raid, kick me in the head for totally getting in the way to take the photo. I’ve taken several luck-based shots that have really worked out, but this one stays with me.

# 5 August 2008 at 8:09 am

Paul D'Andrea said:

This shot here is one that I always think of when asked about lucky shots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauldandrea/1478097604/

I was just starting to play with off camera flash, so when I saw this on LCD I was pretty excited. The combination of motion blur and perfectly stopped action is just great. I really started to get an idea for how powerful lighting could be.

# 5 August 2008 at 8:18 am

Craig Lee said:

I think the simplicity of the donuts is what gives it the wow factor. The shot is just the donuts. Nothing else. No staging. Just some donuts sitting in the morning light ready to be breakfast.

I’ve had a couple of lucky shots as well. This rose was just sitting in an outdoor pavilion. I snapped a couple of frames without touching it. One of my favorite shots and I got it the second week I had my camera. It is what hooked me on photography and showed me the magic that can happen with a camera.

http://Taallyn.zenfolio.com/img/v1/p268556278-4.jpg

This leopard was lying down next to the glass viewing area. Just as my son and I turned to leave he sat up and profiled for us as if he was ready to have his picture taken. Shot through plexiglass at about three feet away in nice late afternoon light.

http://Taallyn.zenfolio.com/img/v0/p357141852-4.jpg

I have a print of the leopard which looks fabulous, and I’ve used the rose in the header for my blog. “Lucky” moments like those are why I enjoy photography so much.

# 5 August 2008 at 8:34 am

Jason said:

My lucky shot was actually one of the first images I took with a digital camera. It was shortly after I made the conversion from film to digital. I walked out onto the front porch of our house and noticed the ice. I used a sigma 70-300 lens at around 214mm for the shot and created one of my favorite images. I’ve tried several times to reproduce the shot but with no real luck.

You can see it here: http://www.ukvphotos.com/gallery/3022282_qUjth/1/#139014688_b5vBj-A-LB

# 5 August 2008 at 9:43 am

Larry Eiss said:

This shot was taken about a month after I got my camera. We were vacationing at the lake and I got up early one morning in hopes of finding a shot like this. I have not been able to reproduce anything like it since.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78344391@N00/368940032/sizes/o/

# 5 August 2008 at 10:06 am

Chester Bullock said:

Without a doubt, I think http://www.flickr.com/photos/chesterbullock/2100603273 is the luckiest shot I have ever gotten. I have seen many photos from this vantage point (throne room in Neuschwanstein), but they don’t render the alps, or the cold of winter, in quite the same way. The bummer of it is that I got it with my cutting edge camera of the day - a 3.2MP P&S…

# 5 August 2008 at 10:12 am

Larry Eiss said:

…sorry… I clicked “Submit” too quickly…

I went out on a dock where we were staying and set up the tripod with my little kit lens on a D50. I snapped several frames, but there was really no need. None of the others captured the mood like this.

I use this image on business cards to promote my Blog and online photo gallery, and it always get comments. If only I had been shooting RAW at the time…

# 5 August 2008 at 10:15 am

John Brainard said:

Here’s my lucky shot:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorkyphotographer/2560128898/

I was out feeding the birds and saw these guys sitting in the tree stump. I have never seen that before and I haven’t seen it since. It was truly a “lucky” shot. I believe it was more than luck, but nothing of my doing. I was up early for some reason. I didn’t intend to do any shooting that day. I had to get ready for men’s fellowship breakfast at Church in an hour or so. They were just there! It made my day. I took these shots just after that, some of the best photos I have in my Flickr stream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorkyphotographer/2560129392/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorkyphotographer/2559306097/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorkyphotographer/2560129530/

# 5 August 2008 at 10:27 am

JanKlier said:

Great story.

They say “Luck is when opportunity meets prepardness”.

I find that what makes people stop is the unexpected. A carefully crafted shot often contains too many things that are not unexpected (because all the planning takes the unexpected out, the purpose of planning). A coffee shop lifestyle shot is what we see everyday in a magazine, or when we go to the store. It’s not unexpected.

I found that a lot of macro photography has the effect of stopping people, because they don’t typically look that close at the world around them. Or anything that is a creative montage of items you don’t always find together. Every once in a while when I let my mind wander creatively I come up with one of these - like an apple with a zipper. But I have to let go and not be constrained by a specific goal which would equire me to create predictable results.

# 5 August 2008 at 10:48 am

elzora said:

Jim, it does stop people; I just opened it up and someone walking behind me stopped and went “Ooooh!” over my shoulder.

When I saw that hanging in the studio I thought it had to have been a very complex shoot, because it looks deceptively simple. I hope y’all’s luck rubs off… wow, these are some fantastic shots! I absolutely love the Neuschwanstein shot, Chester.

I like MacGyver’s motto (tho I don’t recall him actually ever saying it, Pete refers to it): I’d rather be lucky than good. And, at times, I’d have to agree. Especially when shooting horses.

I have a couple lucky shots, but one I’m known for at a barn I shoot at, which tends to bring luck. It was my first time shooting at this barn, shooting something I’d never done before (a carriage driving clinic) and I did it just as a volunteer thing: I’ll shoot until all my cards are full.

I show up on the second day, lock and load the card, walk to the arena’s end door and the horse, hearing me clicking away, looks over. The clinician (Andy Marcoux) is talking to the carriage driver behind the horse, feels the horse move, and looks up behind him. Click. I got home and had this:

http://prints.elzora.com/p875349686/?photo=h0369C7D6#57264086

# 5 August 2008 at 9:58 pm

Jim Talkington (author) said:

What a great day, to come home to this, all of these exceptional photographs. You guys rock! We should compile these into a book or something…

# 5 August 2008 at 10:49 pm

Bill Rhodes said:

Well, duh… pretty much all of them, of course.

# 5 August 2008 at 11:22 pm

Joel J said:

Mine just happened a couple days ago, I received a phone call “Hey, they sunsets looking pretty cool” so I ran outside, saw the pinks and oranges in the clouds then as I followed the colors down all I saw was the tall trees and houses blocking the rest. Grabbed camera, jumped in the car, started racing west to find something higher up to get the shot. Found a 5 story parking garage on the way, drove up, jumped out and got off about 6 shots before it disappeared forever.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jjameson/2726300157/

I’d really like to hire whoever Nature has for a lighting designer!

# 6 August 2008 at 1:38 pm

Craig Robertson said:

I have had a few decent ‘grab’ shots. One I remember is of this Siskin in flight. I nearly stood on the little beggar, then grabbed the camera and got one snap before he flew off.

http://www.crcshetland.co.uk/index.php?album=creatures&image=DSC_6527.jpg

# 8 August 2008 at 6:16 pm

Shanti M said:

My lucky shot would have to be this one:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/antishay/2315202044/

I was taking a walk with friends and we stopped so I could take a picture of these berries out next to the river. I squatted to take some macro shots but the light was too dim - the sunset was dying. I stood up, turned around, and saw this. I didn’t have enough light and I didn’t have a tripod, nor ANYTHING to lean against. I just set my ISO higher, took a deep breath and let it out slowly and shot once. The shot is so still, and the colors rich, and the light brilliant. I’m very proud of this photo.

That’s luck! … and some skill, too, I suppose