What will a photographer do to nail that image?

List your wild stories about risking life and limb to get that image!

Here's mine from this last weekend.

Saturday I was out shooting the underside of a bridge that spans the S.F. bay near Mill Valley. On the land side there is a 2 lane road which curves under this monstrosity and I found that I needed to cross that road to get a better shot. Cars zip along at a fairly furious rate so you basically have to gamble a bit and run! And I did! Losing my glasses along the way. So there I am on the other side blind and my $400 glasses are in the road somewhere with cars zipping by. Bicyclists. The Bus!!! I am just cringing waiting for "crunch" and decided it was more risky trying to find them. So I setup the shot and took the images I was after. Fortunately I was with another photographer and after a half hour or so I got his attention and he managed to find my glasses in the middle of the road untouched. I was amazed. Simply amazed.

I most certainly do not get that kind of action in Vegas!!!!

Standing in waterfall with model on the way out I slipped and instead of letting the camera gear take the hit my face and knee did. Neither were very pretty for the next 2 weeks. Knee is still healing and swollen and scabby. eww.

35mmNewbie wrote in post #12939681
Standing in waterfall with model on the way out I slipped and instead of letting the camera gear take the hit my face and knee did. Neither were very pretty for the next 2 weeks. Knee is still healing and swollen and scabby. eww.

You did the right thing...

Every year many photographers die after climbing over guard rails at waterfalls, cliffs, etc. in various parks and scenic lookouts, trying to get a photograph. Like most obsessions, being obsessive about "getting the shot" can make photographers pay a price way beyond any possible value of "the shot".

Be reasonable. Be safe.

^
http://www.bbc.co.uk/n​ews/world-us-canada-14534611

Yep, it happens. We had a local photographer here in Dallas, die a few weeks ago, trying to shoot skyline shots from an unfinished building. He was backing up to frame the shot and he ended up backing up right off the building and to his death.

Such is life though, in my opinion. You can just as easily die while riding the bus to work in a cubicle too.

I value my family and life above any photographs. While I often have plenty of opportunity for hazardous situations, I keep my priorities.

Todd Lambert wrote in post #12940011
Such is life though, in my opinion. You can just as easily die while riding the bus to work in a cubicle too.

But there is quite a difference between being the victim of a genuine accident, and dying because you were just stupid and exposed yourself to unnecessary risk for an essentially meaningless reason.

Many years ago I worked for the photographic unit at a heavy industrial plant.

I did some crazy things to get the shots,,some my boss wasn't happy wth. I was heaps younger then, fitter and had less fear.

Probably the craziest was when I was lowered into a blast furnace stove (sometime called Cowper stoves) from the top on a bosun's chair to get pics of damaged refractories. The stoves had been off line for around 24 hours but the temperature inside the stove was still around 50-60 degC. From top to bottom inside the stove,,maybe 35 metres..

I was shooting with a very heavy Pentax 6x7 and Metz 60 CT1 flash.I got the pics though.


To give you some idea what a blast furnace stove is, check out the drawing ..Labelled #13.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

For this shot:

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/bjyoder/5781912​900/

Joe read this
http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/Richard_Nickel

rral22 wrote in post #12942000
But there is quite a difference between being the victim of a genuine accident, and dying because you were just stupid and exposed yourself to unnecessary risk for an essentially meaningless reason.

Not really, in my opinion. You're either meant to go or you're not. I don't buy the whole "increased risk" mentality.

Probably could have been arrested for trespassing about a dozen times in various hotel/skyscraper fire escapes trying to get to the roof with friends, luckily we're all 18-20 years old and can outrun them, for some reason they don't really share the same passion for capturing the awesome view from the roof.

I've also had countless skateboarder's jump over me in various gaps, ramps, etc to get a unique angle, and while it wasn't the riskiest thing I've ever done, I felt pretty nervous today walking right into what a news magazine labelled "the worst neighborhood in the country" with my 24-70 and 1D II to get a shot of a fire hall I saw in the distance from the top of a parking garage. I made it out all right though, with this shot:

Todd Lambert wrote in post #12942096
Not really, in my opinion. You're either meant to go or you're not. I don't buy the whole "increased risk" mentality.

That's a risky line of thinking, then.

I've done some death defying stunts in my day but I understood the risks. And took them anyways. That's called youthful ignorance and apathy.

Dying due to heart failure in your cubicle is probably just as ignorant, since one obviously has a sedentary lifestyle in said cubicle and does nothing about it before or after work or on the weekends, but nevertheless, that ignorance is not the same thing as the situational risk listed above.

There are situations you can put yourself in and situations the spinning world puts you in. Some you can control and some you can't. Control the controllables. Don't worry about the rest.

On the news tonight... a young lady was posing for a picture on the railing at Niagara Falls, slipped and fell into the river about 20 feet from the falls. They haven't found her yet.