I Suck At Taking Pictures And So Do You! Here’s Why?

As the snow starts to fall around SOR Headquarters, the white powder has come early this year, which really is terrible considering somewhere in my yard, I have a shovel buried.  I didn’t get all of my wood pile burned.  Somewhere in my yard now are two garden hoses that I hope I don’t run over with my snow blower.  I have firewood covered in snow that I haven’t split yet to help keep my woodstove burning to keep my house nice and warm.  Yes, winter has come early and I’m caught unprepared.  That’s okay though.  It’s par for the course when you live on top of the British Columbia mountains where at this time of year anything can happen.

Last week, my buddy Mike and I went out in the forest to get a giant load of firewood, knowing the snow was coming.  So we packed up my truck.  Grabbed my buddy’s trailer, and hooked it onto the back, and drove off into the wilderness to find some dead fall to cut up and load up.  Up where I live, the province encourages people to go out and take dead trees out of the forest, because it’s the dead trees that are usually the causes for natural forest fires.  Face it, dry wood burns better!  Obvious, right?  So Mike and I get out onto the logging roads.  A road we are very familiar with.  The road is muddy from the previous snow that had melted and turned the road into a cesspool of mud and slush!  The previous week, along the road, I had spotted for the first time in my life, a Momma Moose and her calf walking through a swamp.  That was cool.  A couple months previous, we had a bear run out in front of us.  Yes, it is cool living so close to the wild.

This time though, we were in for a real treat.   We were about five miles into the forest, driving along. Mike and I were in deep conversation about some conspiracy theories, which is normal for us.  As we came around the corner, about forty to fifty feet in front of us, I saw something jump onto the road from the right.  I immediately slammed on my breaks, and came to a complete stop.  What was awesome, was right in front of us was the biggest lynx cat I had ever seen.  Now I had only seen one before, and that was driving home in the middle of the night, so I didn’t get too good of a glimpse of it.  But here we were. 11 o’clock in the morning, and here is this gorgeous wild cat standing right in front of my truck.  We were just amazed, watching this gorgeous silver and black cat with its cropped tail, whispy cheeks and pointed ears staring right back at us.  It was the closest I’ve ever been to a wild cat in the forest.  At least that I know of.  Cats are stealthy, so as many times as I’ve been in the forest, who knows how many big cats have watched me, and I haven’t even seen them?  It’s probably happened a few times.  But I’ll never know.

Here’s this beautiful lynx, right there, standing, staring back at us right in the middle of the road.  At that point, I know I have to get a picture of this big kitty.  You know this is what amazes me about the human brain?  Hundreds, if not thousands of times I have grabbed my phone to take a quick picture.  Whether it’s something funny my son is doing or just something amazing to try and capture, like the northern lights, I’m always able to capture those.  But sometimes our brains go to mush, like mine did, and I was fumbling and bumbling to get my iPhone out of ‘lock’.  The damn button, of all times, wouldn’t recognize my thumb print.  When it finally did, of course I have to hit about 17 apps before I finally got to the camera.  Then somehow, when I’ve never done this before, somehow my fingers swipe the camera from stills to video.  Dammit I didn’t want video at that time.  I know you are laughing right now because this has happened to you!  It sucks when it happens because it makes you feel like such an idiot, doesn’t it?

So as I’m acting like a teenager with a lit firecracker in my hand trying to get my brain, my eyes and my hands to act somewhat coordinated, this lynx, who was posing perfectly on the road for me, sighed, and was like “screw this guy” and started to walk again across the muddy road, and into the trees.  I literally could feel the cat rolling its eyes at me in frustration!  Stupid Human!  As he heads into the ditch beside me, and into the trees, I finally gather my coordination, get my camera on my phone, roll down the window, and yell at the lynx, “Hey puss!  Can you stop so I can get a picture, please?”  The damn cat stopped there in the trees.  It gave me this look, as any cat would, “Really?  Now you’re ready? Fine!”  Thankfully the iPhone has such an incredible camera on it, because I caught the grainiest picture of this beautiful cat.  Please note the sarcasm on the quality of camera my phone has!  Terrible!  I took for quick snaps before the cat turned and walked away, thinking I’m an idiot.

Only one of the four turned out!

Now, the reason why I bring this up is because this is EXACTLY what happens when people see things out of their ordinary.  We get hit with adrenaline to the point where we lose control of the simplest body functions.  Which leads to the most brutal and terrible photos that we see when it comes to Bigfoot, Dogman, Faeries, Ghosts, Aliens, you name it.  It’s because we panic.  We don’t mean to.  But it happens.  Our anxiety of missing the ‘perfect shot’ of the anomaly kicks into high gear.  Like a manual transmission, from first to sixth, without shifting into second, third, fourth or fifth!  It sucks!  Let’s be honest.  Imagine how many quality videos or photos we’d have of cryptid creatures if that body panic didn’t kick in at the worst possible moment.  It’s like being a virgin all over again!  Yes, I went there!

We always complain about the blurry, grainy photos that people try to depict of creatures that aren’t supposed to exist.  Well it happens with creatures that do exist as well!  So I got to test out my theory on the lynx, which really looked like his name was ‘Garry’, and I proved to myself that I suck at photography, and the chances of me ever catching a bigfoot or dogman in the forest are literally slim to none.  Now I know all of the tech experts out there will tell me to go get a Go-Pro or something along those lines, which I probably should.  But I’m stubborn and a cheap Ukrainian, which means the likelihood of me actually splurging on such quality product is unlikely!

Hey it can happen to anybody, right?  I mean I didn’t mean for it to happen this way, but it did.  So let’s go easy on those people who claim they see something with a shitty photo that follows.  Unless the photo looks so bad that it’s probably nothing