One of the things I like about my camera is that almost all the controls/settings, certainly the ones I use most, are all external knobs and dials rather than being buried in menus. Before heading home from Burr Oak State Park we went for another hike, the opposite direction to when we arrived. The tree roots, inevitable on a forest trail, are a challenge for Jill, so while we did go a good distance, we didn’t complete a circuit. When we turned back towards the car, I got out my camera, while she walked on.

As we came down the trail, there were regular signs warning about flooding, but although they looked new, they must still have been a couple of weeks old, as there was no water anywhere. Where we turned round was near the bottom of a gully, with the suggestion of a creek, and so I wanted to try to photograph the dryness. I had to hurry as Jill was already getting ahead on the trail, and so I didn’t have time to understand what had happened when the preview screen came up black after I pressed the shutter.

When I opened back home on the computer, I was surprised to see it was indeed black, and the issue had not been with the preview system. I got the camera out of my bag and realized the shutter speed dial had been moved from A for automatic (that is, set by the camera based on what I set the aperture on the lens) and was instead set on the fastest speed available (so almost no light would have reached the sensor when I pressed the shutter release). Easy enough to see, if I remember to look!
So that’s the black image you see here. And the top image is the same file, after I had developed it in the software. Maybe not a great photograph, but still pretty amazing.