It was a Sizzlers ad that made a profound impact on my thinking. The proverbial phrase is “when life deals you a lemon, make lemonade”, to encourage a positive outlook on a situation that has put one in an adverse situation. The Sizzlers TV commercial as I remember states “when life deals you a lemon, find a lobster tail to squeeze it on”. Those may not be exact words, but the gist remains. For those who do not eat seafood, lobster is very expensive seafood. The original phrase merely encourages you to bootstrap and deal with the situation. The TV commercial, as much of a cliche as it is, tells you to go beyond merely mitigating the consequences and go big.
Recently my wife and I visited our son in Jacksonville, Florida. We went to St. Augustine and visited an Alligator Farm ( https://www.alligatorfarm.com/ ). Only lens I took with me is a Sigma 17-35 on this trip though I should have packed a zoom. The ultra wide angle lens was a good choice for the gators, and it turned out that the farm also attracts a large number of birds. It was a beautiful day with plethora of birds flying overhead and I rued my decision to leave my Sony 70-400 (aka bazooka) at home. Though it was not life that dealt me a lemon, it was more of a self-inflicted situation.
As you can see from the above two examples, I faced two adversarial situations. One is to get the airborne bird in sharp focus and two, the details of the bird are not very clearly seen. I knew that my camera’s high pixel count will help me with details of the bird and had a bit of trouble with getting the focus on the bird, it being a very small portion of the view the camera is seeing due to wide angle lens. Then it dawned on me. My camera has a high speed shooting mode (12 frames per second – fps & mechanical shutter), perhaps the highest for a 42MP camera. In auto-focus continuous mode, once the focus is locked on a moving object (the bird in this case), I went for a burst of shots, a first for me, before focus is lost and re-acquired. This is closest I came to squeezing the lemon on a lobster as you can see in the two images below.
