A Two-handed Shooter I'm Not!

I was standing at my computer desk doing - well, who the hell knows what I was doing - in the barn. The doors at both ends of the building were open, sunset was approaching, mostly unnoticed, and then the light suddenly changed.

Panic stations!!

I grabbed the camera and ran out the front of the barn. That's the farthest away, since my computer station is only a couple steps from the back of the barn, but the trees crowd in pretty close back there so the best long-range views are out front.



When I skidded to a halt on the gravel driveway with all the grace of a world-class hockey player getting set for a one-touch slapshot deep in the blue-zone (OK, so my skid was more like a crash landing, but I saved the camera!!) I was confronted with a rainbow in the east and a pretty spectacular sunset in the west.



Now I'm a child of the 60's and grew up on Saturday afternoon westerns but I'm crap at two-handed shooting, what with being solidly left handed which means I don't have all that much control over my right hand. Besides, I only have the one camera. Unfortunately I also have only seconds before the light will change again and both of these magnificent views will be lost forever, so I start desperately fumbling with the settings on the camera while trying to figure out which way to shoot first. (On top of that, point-and-shoots are absolutely terrible at capturing lighting conditions like this, wanting to 'normalize' everything into a generic, studio-lit portrait instead, so auto is useless but the manual settings are clumsy when you're in a hurry.

By the time the light changed and the sky was boringly generic again I was feeling kind of dizzy, so I'm pretty sure I forgot to breath as I shot and adjusted and shot and spun around and shot and adjusted and - well, you get the idea.