This May Have Been the One
One of my goofy self-portraits may have angered the gods, resulting in the sudden gust of wind that tipped over my tripod and smashed my camera lens.
This may have been the one.
It’s one of the first ones I took, me pretending I’m falling off the mountain. It’s perhaps not something to joke about since it does happen to people from time to time. There’s a golden rule that if you’re photographing somewhere where the footing is treacherous, you don’t move your feet with the camera to your eye — it’s too easy to think you can move a few more inches to frame things just right, and find yourself falling off a cliff instead.
But I’m scared of heights and get a strong dose of vertigo even within a few feet of a dropoff, so the picture was more to make fun of myself. I’m actually nowhere near any cliff edges, and in fact am next to the big rock I’m standing on in this picture.
The thing I was most disappointed in with the pictures (apart from getting my lens smashed up) was that the self-portraits look a little fake, like I used Photoshop to slap a picture of myself across a real picture of Mount Hood, thanks to the different light that was hitting the peak of Tom, Dick, and Harry Mountain and Mount Hood (which is still a ways away from where I’m standing).