Through the years, I have photographed a lot of landscape, fashion, decaying architecture and sports professionally, and have enjoyed some decent success in each realm. No, I don’t view myself as any kind of Richard Avedon or Ansel Adams, but I do think a handful of my photos could be fairly termed “good.” I’ve enjoyed that journey and the experiences that went with it, and perhaps that is the most important thing.

Rocket launch photography is a whole other animal. To make a great launch shot, you need access (the closer the better), and the ability to deal with some very mixed conditions: the fire and flame is incredibly bright while the rest of the photo is either in normal light or at night. In the early days of digital cameras the available dynamic range was lacking, and film has its own personality — chrome (slide) film has maybe a +/- 2 stop latitude, and negative film perhaps as many as +/- 5 stops. That’s helpful, but color darkroom is a bear in its own right. That said, dodging and burning in is really hard for color.

Anyway, for the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s STS-123 launch in 2008, I set up with negative film and essentially ran a whole roll of film through in the first few seconds of launch. The initial shots were kind of…okay…but the third to last one was a real keeper.

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.