Have you ever had one of those days that just doesn’t go exactly right? I would guess that you are nodding yes, if not fervently. Well, I sure had one of those days recently: a shoot at Conejo Valley Botanic Garden for Wednesday’s Flower.

I arrived in the Los Angeles area back in January, very happy to be leaving the cold and snow behind, and I stopped to survey the botanic garden near our hotel. The next day, I packed up my gear, drove over to the botanic garden, and started to set up for my shoot. With my tripod ready to go and my camera in hand, I realized I was missing the mount to attach my camera to the tripod. Standing there in a little bit of shock (okay maybe a lot), I try to figure out how this happened and remembered that I left the mount on another piece of equipment back home. Though not quite over the shock, I look around at my surroundings and thought, how am I going to attach my camera to my tripod?

So, I looked through my camera bag and came across some cables I had and tied them around the camera to hold it in place on the tripod. It was not the perfect solution, a little precarious and not so stable especially when the camera was turned sideways for portrait images, but it worked.

The story doesn’t stop there though. Later that day, I went to download all of the images to my computer, and as I was doing this, I had a few images to delete first and somehow in doing so, I permanently deleted all of the images I took that day. After calling Apple support and finding out there was no way to retrieve them, which was what I expected to hear though hoping for a miracle, I definitely shed a few tears.

To lose a day of shooting was pretty hard to take, but the next day I was able to carve out time in the morning to go back and shoot the flowers again. This time with my camera duct taped to the tripod.

So, what is to be learned from this? For me it is to have a checklist that I still need to create (yikes), to be resourceful, shedding a few tears is okay, and not to be deterred when challenges come my way. Nothing that is worth doing is easy, it takes work, dedication and flexibility in the moment, which is not always easy to do, but usually worth trying. In saying all that, if it sounds as if this came easy to me, it did not, it was hard, but it makes it all the more worth sharing.

All that being said, I hope you enjoy Wednesday’s Flower as it was a flower I thought was worth shooting twice.

Share with me a challenging day and how maybe there were tears but how you persevered.

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