brought to you by a cosmic coincidence

Originally posted January 8 2007

So I went to the beach across the street from my house yesterday to grab a few snaps of the ocean... It was a very lovely day... just windy enough to make some whitecaps...

It's not exactly a beach... rather a stretch of shore composed of sand and rocks. The seawall is steep and you can only actually walk on this "beach" when the tide is out... or on its way out as the case was yesterday.

The sunset was as lovely as it usually is... nothing spectacular... but nice

So right before I head in to help Dave get the kids supper... there's a plane on the horizon. It was a fairly big plane... I suspect from on of the military installments in the neighborhood... Anyway I still get edgy when I see planes flying so low. Living in one of those gateway-to-the-continent cities you'd think I'd get use to it by now... but alas... Memories of SwissAir always flood into my mind when I see low flying planes over the ocean. Anyhow... a plane that low is a good photo op... so I'm trying to get a shot of it.

And then something spectacular happened that involved my eyes my brain my finger and perfect timing... this happened...

My heart pumped blood through my arteries so hard I felt it in my throat. I had only caught a momentary glimpse through the lens and from my perspective... it looked like a giant fireball had come out of plane. Funnily enough... the first thing I did... before I looked up at the plane to see if there were flaming parachutes being ejected from the beast... was refer to the digital file to make sure I had got the shot.

As I raised my arms to get the images that my brain had been congering in those brief miliseconds, I realized, there was no smoke... no flames... no flailing bodies falling into the cold Atlantic below (thank god) but the cargo door of the plane was closing.

So... what I figured happened was that at that exact moment, from that exact position, correcting for height and shoulder width and trajctory of the camera... the cosmos alligned the sun, that plane, the operation that was being performed by the crew, and my brain for me to bring you that picture.