I learned something that night. Something very important. If you're going to do something that you can't do very often, like take the most awesome photos of an awesome celestial happening, learn how to use your equipment. Become familiar with your equipment. Like camera settings.
Because if you don't, it doesn't matter that the way cool timer takes a picture every thirty seconds. I doesn't matter that the electrical adapter for the camera does a great job and you don't have to worry about running out of battery power. It doesn't matter that you go outside and walk down the steps to the camera set up every fifteen minutes for hours, while your husband is in bed fast asleep, to carefully wipe the late night/early morning dew off of the camera lens, carefully because you don't want to change the angle of the camera.
Because if you don't learn how to properly use your equipment and get the settings right, when you know you'll be too excited about the photos you just took, how wonderful they'll look, so wonderful that you just know you'll be too excited to sleep so you really should download them straight away, at one fifteen in the morning, a little sad that it's well before the eclipse is officially over, but the clouds have covered the moon...
And you download the lot of them, hundreds and all you see are black rectangles....
Well, you know the lesson to be taken from this...know your equipment, you dolt!
I was dead tired Tuesday. I went to bed four hours after my normal bedtime. I went up and down those stairs poolside countless times. I couldn't walk. I fell asleep on the sofa after breakfast. Woke up a couple of hours later to find that Brian had made the bed and done the dishes. He had to leave to help his mom with the financial folks and I took a shower, then drove over and joined them.
And fell asleep early on the sofa and was in bed before 9:30 last night.
And all I can say is "learn your equipment".
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