I am not Ansel Adams

This trip has really illustrated to me the limitations of my camera. Bad weather aside, I'm just not getting a lot of great shots out of what could have been prize-winning museum pieces, the sale of which would fund the purchase of several private islands. Alas, blame my lack of global photographic chops on my little Elph.

You just can't do without an F-stop. Shooting a forest floor requires a level of shutter control that you're just not going to get with an automatic camera. And don't get me started on telephoto lenses. I shot elk from half a mile a way for ten minutes before I realized how ridiculous it was.

The shots that I hate missing the most, however, are the impossible moments. Like hitting a coastal switchback and having your vision rotate 270 degrees in ten seconds and seeing something beautiful at every point. Or having a gull hover five feet from your face in dewey fog for a split second before drifting away. Or catching the reflection of distant blue sky in a river while the rest of the landscape lies cloaked in grey.

Worst of all, today I hit Gold Beach just before sunset. Imagine skating past giant upthrust rocks on wide open sand lit in glorious golden hour sunlight. The diffuse atmoshperics would have made the camera choke and spit out a whitish blur - it could not capture the subtle mesh between ocean and land, where golden brushstrokes blurred the line until only the texture of the waves marked the division.

There are masters of photography that can capture that, and they do so in their own time, but most of us must be content with the experience alone. Leave the image to the calendars and postcards and concentrate on the moment as it happened to you personally. Some moments cannot be captured.

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