Every now and then, an opportunity to shoot comes up that I manage to either overlook or just plain see the shot without my camera in hand. It happens to everyone. My most recent missed shot was of the Night Blooming Cirrus in my front yard. I had hoped to be able to shoot a model in front of it while it was in full bloom. Unfortunately, the blooms did not wait for the weekend and were well past their peak by Friday morning. Had I tried and schedule a model to arrive in full make up and ready to shoot at 5:00AM, it might have worked, except for the simple fact that now that I have a regular job, I leave the house by 5:30AM and I do not like to shoot and run with models.
I once found myself surrounded by a series of really neat reflections, but since I was in an express bus with tinted windows that were filthy, I didn’t even take the camera out of my bag. I saw a very neat image, but the plane was on final approach so I couldn’t get my camera out. While shooting kayaks going over a dam in Philadelphia, I missed taking a shot of a kayak being swept into a hydraulic (I felt it more important to throw a rescue line). The shots I hate missing are the ones that sneak up on you due to your film or flashcard being full. Perhaps the most embarrassing kind of missed shots are due to either improperly loading or forgetting to load the camera.
Of all the reasons to miss shots, equipment failure is the rarest one I’ve encountered. Perhaps that is due to my habit of keeping extra batteries, film or flashcards on hand. Quite possibly it stems from keeping my equipment clean, well maintained, and packed so it is easy to grab at a moment’s notice. Carly Simon has it right, ANTICIPATION is the key to not missing shots. Landscape photographers need to observe and wait for light to make their shots interesting. In sports, due to the nature of multiple shot sequencing, you are more likely to miss a shot by the spray and pray method than by anticipating the shot and hitting the shutter at the right moment in time.
Lets keep missed shots to a minimum.