Guest Photo Of The Day: June 15, 2008

Today is Father's Day, so I'm breaking from the norm to share where my photographic talent came from. My father was never a professional photographer, but he spent enough time around cameras, working his entire life for Eastman Kodak. Among his other privileges at Kodak was the opportunity to test new cameras before they came out. That meant he had to take a lot of shots, but also do it rather invisibly, since Kodak didn't want consumers, or worse still, the competition, seeing an unreleased product before it came to market. So he always had a camera in his hand and knew when an opportunity for a good photo was brewing somewhere. Today's shot is the result of that awareness: he took it in Florida at the exact moment a great blue heron took off from its perch. And in those days, he was shooting film (he's since converted to digital -- Kodak, of course), so even though he had a generous film processing allowance, he couldn't just rely on a 6.5 FPS continuous shooting mode on an 8GB card to get his choice of his best digital picks like we can today. Instead, he had to wait, wait some more, and then get the shot at the absolute exact right time. You can see he nailed it perfectly, even adding the right amount of flash to ensure that the underside of the wings were optimally lit. I don't know who could top this shot, including me. Happy Father's Day, Dad, and thanks for the genes.