After my many years of photography there’s one sad lesson I’ve learned: If I have an opportunity to photograph a one-time, got-to-be-that-day, can’t-be-rescheduled event, the weather is going to screw it up. And I can’t control the weather.
Super moon? Overcast. Historic meteor shower? Overcast. Eclipse? Overcast.
It never fails.
That’s the reason I don’t bother planning to photograph any exciting celestial events. I know months in advance that the weather, no matter my location, will screw it up.
Last April I learned that Pat’s Theory of Bad Photo Weather also applies to one-time travel opportunities.
My wife and I scheduled a Viking River Cruise through the Czech Republic and Germany, starting in Prague and ending in Berlin. The itinerary included some very interesting sites — and sights — but one morning on the schedule captured my attention. We were going to visit the Bastei, a rock formation rising about 650 feet above the Elbe River (or about 1,000 feet above sea level) in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains near Rathen, Germany. The jagged rocks of the Bastei were formed by water erosion over one million years ago.
I had seen photos of the Bastei and knew this was a fun opportunity to get some nice travel landscape photographs of a geologic treasure that I would likely never see again. I studied online info on the Bastei, gaining an understanding of the direction of morning sunlight that time of year so I could make tentative plans for photography. I packed lenses that would best allow me to get the type of photos I wanted. I was ready.
I awoke early that morning and looked out the window of our cabin on the Viking longship. A steady drizzle was falling, but we still had a couple of hours before we would board the buses. Maybe it would clear.
As we boarded the buses, a steady drizzle still fell. On the bus ride up the mountain the drizzle was joined by fog. By the time we arrived at the site visibility was probably less than a quarter mile.
The rock formations became shadows in the fog. But I photographed them anyway, trying to make the fog work in the images I captured. In some cases it did. In most cases it didn’t.
We spent a couple of hours in the cold, dreary conditions before grabbing some hot chocolate in the Panoramarestaurant (panoramic restaurant) overlooking the Elbe, which was somewhere underneath the fog. Then we returned to the bus.
About an hour later, after we had reboarded the boat and were preparing to leave the dock, the sun broke through the clouds.
I could have predicted that.