I had an experience this past weekend that really is worth sharing.

I was shooting a 3-day expo this past week and the management of the expo wanted lots of photos of the setup, which spanned 2 1/2 days. While I was there, I decided to setup a gopro on a tall light stand and do a time-lapse of the entire setup. Every 4 hours I moved the camera to a different location around the expo hall just to add a bit of variety to the video I would make out of this. I had the camera take a photo every 10 seconds and it just sat there all day, firing away.

On the 3rd day of the expo, I was contacted by one of the vendors...a major company all of us photographers have heard of. Turns out that during the setup of their booth, they actually had a gopro camera stolen from inside the booth and they knew that my camera was in the expo hall taking pictures. They first asked the hotel if they had a security camera in the room and they didn't, so they asked if my camera happened to catch any footage of their booth. I had to explain that a gopro shoots very wide and that it's unlikely that even if I saw anything happening in their booth, the odds on identifying anyone was virtually impossible.

They then told me where their booth was and oddly enough, during the hours that their camera was stolen, mine happened to be not 50 feet from their booth and was aimed RIGHT AT THEM! When I told the booth manager about this, she was thrilled, and then told all her staff that I got it all recorded.

An hour later, the camera magically shows up. Someone claimed they found it out in the parking lot (yeah, right).

I pulled the card from the camera that night and started looking through all the photos. About 1 hour into my shooting, I saw their staff come into the booth and start unloading boxes. They told me that the camera was stashed in a podium near the front of the booth and that it was probably stolen from there. I saw the footage of their staff manager take some boxes and unload them into the podium, for storage and then leave.

An hour later, some of the staff that they hired to construct the booth arrived and started unloading more equipment and low and behold, I see a guy pop open that podium, snoop around inside for about a minute, then leave with an object in his hand. An hour after that, I see the manager return and go through the podium herself. She rummaged through it for a while, as if looking for something (the now missing gopro) and then I see her get on her phone and walk in circles around the podium for 15 minutes. She was making calls trying to figure out where it went. All the footage completely told the story of what happened.

I emailed the select photos of activity around the podium to her and also the union representative in charge of the labor hired to work the expo hall and the booth setup. Turns out the guy I captured, clear as day, was the guy who claimed he found the camera and tried to return it...he was the thief! They confronted the guy about it and for fear of losing his job, he confessed to stealing it. They fired him on the spot.

I thought it was the coolest thing ever, that I caught a gopro thief USING A GOPRO! I think maybe I should contact Gopro about this but the company involved doesn't want their name or likeness used related to this incident for some reason. But anyway, I thought it was pretty funny and worth sharing.

Anyone else ever shoot something weird like this, where you didn't know you captured something significant until after you shot it?

I was shooting youth sports stuff (Little League) that can sometimes be three hours of
herding cats. There in the background, and dog whizzing on a tree. So I did what I had to,
cropped it super tight and made a baseball trading cards out of it.

A female model.

A junkie jumping off a bridge.

My wife.

The classic 1960's movie "Blow Up" is about a fashion photoshoot in which the photographer unknowingly happens to capture a murder taking place in the background.

Yeah, the 1:47 AM ferals caterwauling and why I can't sleep.

Loving the kitty cats above... simply way too funny

Ok so here's a dazed and confused kayaker



Not quite what I saw in the view finder before activating the shutter release
At 1/4000 what you see may or may not be what you get...
Yes I'd been out in the hot summer sun (95+ degrees) way too long... lol

Once in Soviet Georgia some soldiers wanted me to follow them
and take pictures, they had a beat up guy and guns with the safety
off (AK's) and I knew what they were going to do and that they wanted
a foreign correspondent to photograph it.  I refused, but a young
photographer went along.  She won a World Press Award for the
image of these guys shooting the guy.  If she had refused, as I and
all the other foreign correspondents did, they probably would not
have shot the guy, who they claimed was from the opposition,
which turned out not to be true.

In other words the best picture I did not take....

P.S. BLOW UP is one of my favorite movies..

I can't say that I've ever captured anything "weird" but I have captured two explosions.  Both with still cameras and both within 6 months of one another.  It's rare enough to even witness an explosion, much less capture one on film because they happen so quickly but I've lucky enough to grab two.

One was a transformer explosion and the other was a gas main explosion.  The gas main was bigger and badder. It shook and rattled windows as far away as 5 - 7 miles.  The image of the transformer explosion below is much smaller but a much more dramatic and a far better shot.

I've caught lightning strikes a couple of times.  This was a storm passing over Staten Island, viewed from my condo in Keyport, NJ to the south.  NYC and the Verazzano bridge are visible on the horizon.

https://photos.modelmayhem.com/photos/1 … ddc632.jpg

Another weird capture...

I was taking a photography course on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, NJ and we finished by photographing the fireworks.  We were all lined up with our tripods capturing the ground displays when two young beauties stopped right in front of us (it was quite dark... I don't think they saw us).  Their presence added foreground interest, so I just kept shooting and during one frame, I noticed this african american dude dressed completely in black, walk just in front of them.  You can see his white sneakers as he walked during the 5 sec exposure.

https://www.modelmayhem.com/portfolio/pic/40729545

New from just this weekend:

Watching me get hit with the ball when photographing a golf tournament turns out to be the highlight of everyones day! Yep, it stung a bit.

Can't recall anything off the top of my head, but would LOVE to catch a UFO someday on camera in this lifetime! 

Also, I'm tentatively going to go ghost hunting later this year (my first time), so we'll see hehe

Took a pic of my dog looking at me while I pumped gas. Then later saw the flying ghost car in the background