**View on Black or you be Whack** You can see the culprits of my sleepless night in this image if you look closely enough. There was some sort of "Desert Rave" going on down there by the left tufa's, with laser beams and really ridiculous techno beats. Better still, we were downwind, so the party tunes just carried on the breeze all night long, rattling around in our tents. Undeterred, Breezy snored on. How he slept through that I'll never know. Paul busied himself texting his soon-to-be bride. Only we had no cell service, so I think he was merely composing the texts he was GOING to send the next day in his mind, so that he could get an early jump on the 500 text barrage at dawn. As is typical in my photography outings, the next morning was a cluster-eff. The composition I had confidently declared the day before would be absolutely "money" turned out to be an absolute cow patty when viewed with fresh eyes. So I scrambled. For those of you that are about to type, "The comp would be better if you moved a little left", put a sock in it. Tough to tell from this image, but I was pulling a "Mission Impossible" already, and further left simply wasn't going to happen. Trouble is, I'm 75% bigger, 112% dumber, and 250% less agile than Tom Cruise. I once tipped a canoe in a decent sized rapid and to this day my friend recounts the story to all that will listen about how I was just flailing around out there bobbing up and down like some god damned buoy instead of paddling towards shore like a normal person. At any rate, obtaining this vantage point is a simple matter of scaling a large sized tufa, and shimmying across a toe-sized ledge until you get far enough left to get a little bit of separation between fore and aft elements. Only trouble is, there isn't enough room on that ledge to turn sideways, much less set up a tripod. So there I was, big poofy bright red jacket on to make sure that everyone in the state of California would notice the idiot who got himself stuck halfway around a tufa, face plastered into the rock. Since I couldn't rotate to face my camera, and I needed my left hand to hold on, I stuck my camera in my right hand, turned my tripod into a monopod as the ledge was one tripod foot wide, and leaned the camera up against the wall, as far around to the left as I could. I couldn't get my face off the wall far enough to see the LCD, so I got the settings to my best guess, and started firing away, hoping for the best. The plan was to get the first rays of light kissing the very tips of the tufa's in the scene. Everything was going GREAT.... sunrise looked good, I hadn't died yet, hadn't lost my camera yet, and I'm pretty sure Paul and Breezy were too busy shooting to notice what an massive idiot I looked like. After the light had reached the tip of the tufa's, I figured I had it "in the tin" so to speak, so I pulled the camera off the wall and managed to adjust myself enough to be able to see the LCD. Everything looked good...except I wasn't wide enough. No matter, the light was still just at the top of the tufa's, so I had time to zoom out and re-plaster my camera against the wall. Only genius here was already as wide as my telephoto lens would go. And my 24-70 was sitting safely down on the ground, 20 feet below. Nothing like bringing the wrong lens the time you put yourself in a precarious enough position where you can't carry the rest of your gear. Sigh.... There is no cure for stupid, I've discovered.
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