As many Australians will recall, it rained on New Years Eve in Melbourne, Australia. Did that make me happy. NO, I had everything all planned out.

Got there at a reasonable time and chose my location which would best suit my composition. Next on the agenda was to set up the tripod, camera, cable release and leveler (as some of my shots from last year were about lopsided). All set.

Now waiting for the fireworks to start. Then a family chose to sit in front of my view, slightly blocking it but hey that was OK as I would be shooting up in the air, so I recomposed when they FINALLY sat down. All set.

Then it started spitting raindrops. OK I thought to myself, I can handle a little bit of rain but it got heavier and heavier.

Suffice to say, I had to pack up, ensured that my camera equipment was placed in waterproof bags and I ended up standing under the umbrella with my little trustworthy LX3. By this stage, I was completely drenched that I ended up using the scene Fireworks mode on the camera. All thoughts of my manual exposures with tripod sufficiently stripped from my head as disaster had struck. Imagine if you will, trying to hold an umbrella to protect my camera, holding a P/S camera in the air and remain as steady as possible with a shutter speed of 1/4 sec.

So out of all that, I made a composition shot of what I originally would have aimed for, had the Melbourne weather not let me down (remembering that it got up to 38 degrees earlier that day)....

Lessons learnt from this experience....the best laid plans don't always work and ensure that you have a back-up plan. A water camera is now on my wish list........