It happens to us all, and we moan and wail. I was right there, it happened right in front of my face, I had a camera…and I still didn’t get the shot!
My best was when a wedge of geese moved through a line of ducks, almost exactly re-creating the Battle of Trafalgar…and this was shortly before the 200th Anniversary. I could have sold it to a sailing or history magazine! Wah!
Lightning strike through The Window at Big Bend National Park, TX.
It was out of focus.
In October 1997, I was in Florida and found out the Cassini was being launched in a few days. It was controversial and such because of the Plutonium fuel aboard, but no matter. I stood on a jetty at around 3 a.m. with hundreds of other enthusiasts, nearly all of whom had far better cameras than my crappy disposable unit. I went through the roll (bzzt-bzzt-bzzt-click!) getting pics of the rocket. A few minutes after, a helicopter (flying security, probably) passed directly in front of the full moon but I had no exposures left.
My pictures of the launch are completely useless. I may as well have been snapping pics of a road flare 500 yards away.
A police chase with a semi being pursued by about 30 cops. All the tires were gone. I grabbed a camera out of the safe and ran outside. I tossed in a roll of film, brought the camera up to my eye and fired off a three second exposure. :smack:
Bigfoot, Elvis, and Jackie O emerged into a clearing of the forest right in front of me, while I was changing film.
Took some pictures of my dog whom was diagnosed as dying in a few days. Later, I found out there was no film in the camera. Mid - 1980s with 35mm roll film.
At the Taj Mahal, a woman was standing next to the entrance gate, facing the Taj Mahal, with her sari swept dramatically to the right by the wind. It would have made for a nice photo but her husband was there and I didn’t want to cause offense.
Got some killer photos of a hippo surfacing right next to the boat below Murchison Falls. Ran out of film, and while I was changing film a giant crocodile launched himself at us from the shore.
Had I waited 5 more seconds on this picture I would have a perfectly framed caribou with pink fringes on the aurora. But I stopped the picture as a truck pass 100 Miles up the Dempster. I didn’t see another truck, nor another caribou as long as the Aurora lasted that night.
https://s31.postimg.org/uu6ae8uy3/23770519536_0e50ff8783_b.jpg
It would have been perfectly framed but the next image was way too over exposed due to the approaching semi. It was only my second shot and I was focusing on focus and not composition.
To be fair it was my first full sky aurora experience, and it had faded a lot by the time I managed to get around to the artistic part.
I missed getting photos at the top of both Telescope Peak and Mt Whitney because of dead batteries.
I’ve missed many, many great images over the years, but the most frustrating one was when I was testing a new remote control for my D70, and as I was playing with it, my dog went over and looked at the camera. I got a great, hilarious image of her snout (I could see it in the preview LCD), and then the image failed to be written to the CF card - the one and only time that ever happened.
I’ve had a neat shot of a coyote hunting ruined once. You know that famous footage of the Artic fox hunting in the snow? You know, this one. Well, the coyote was in a field at Point Reyes, and I saw his head tilting as he heard the gophers underground, and his muscles bunched, and…
A car drove past, between me and the coyote.
Here he is. I watched him eat three gophers in 10 minutes!
I was on the island of Guadeloupe, on the day of a total solar eclipse in 1998. It was Carnival season, and I had stopped to photograph a very picturesque little native house, not much more than a log cabin, but with exquisite detail. Suddenly a little child appeared in a window, wearing a huge colorful mask. The composition was perfect. It was only then that I realized I was out of film. Then the kid was gone.
I was in Yellowstone in September of 2007. I’d visited the year before and seen a few wolves, but none close enough for a good photo. So I went back there with a friend and I had a 300 f2.8 pro lens with a 1.4 power teleconverter, on a monopod, sitting on my lap in the passenger’s seat while he drove. I had the camera on Manual, with the settings perfect for the current light that early morning as we drove along the Yellowstone River.
I looked out the window and saw a white wolf swimming across the river with a dead goose in her mouth. I yelled at my friend to stop the car, jumped out, got the wolf in my viewfinder, pressed the shutter button…and the flash popped up. As I’d jumped out of the car, the dial that changed modes had been jostled and shifted from Manual to the little green Auto square. By the time I changed modes and got the camera back up, the wolf was up the bank on the other side of the river and gone.
That wolf died later that year, so that was the only chance I ever would have had to get a shot of her.
rat avatar and araminty: Well, what you did come up with are really pretty pics, so you get a consolation prize of “Not what I wanted…but darn nice!”
AncientHumanoid: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Or else too much Jack Daniels…
Everyone else: ouch! Photography is a fun hobby, but every now and then, it’ll break your heart!
Several years ago in Nova Scotia. I took a shot of a small bright yellow house sitting atop a very green hill. The sky was a bold blue with bright, dramatic clouds.
There was a large-ish boulder in the foreground that I wanted in the frame. Unfortunately, my point of focus fell on the boulder with an aperture that provided a shallow depth of field.
The boulder was tack sharp, the house, out of focus.
Totally ruined what would have been an awesome shot.
mmm
Mine was Far Side, actually.
I did a remote products shoot that I had to set a custom color balance for. Really, really out there mix of odd lights, flash was not an option. Next day, I’m doing a family portrait job. Reset everything on my camera… except the freaky custom color balance. So basically, I missed every shot. LOTS of Photoshop got me back in the game, but certain really great poses were left behind because I couldn’t quite fix them enough.
Been shooting for 30 years, still had a learning curve when I switched to digital.
Well, gophers are the potato chips of the animal world.
Rabbits are the cheetos.
That’s what converting to black and white is for! 
(Only half joking. I assume you were shooting JPEG then, and not raw. With raw, it would not be a problem, of course. But convert to monochrome is my go-to for when I just don’t feel like dealing with balancing all sorts of mixed lights together.)
I’m sure I have many of these, but none come to mind at the moment. I’ve definitely done the whole “shoot-a-roll-of-film-in-the-camera” thing only to realize later there was no roll of film loaded (after which you learn to watch the the rewind knob to make sure it advances every time you cock the shutter. With the “newer” film cameras with an LCD panel, of course, that would not be a problem as it would tell you via the frame count. I put “newer” in quotes as “newer” refers to about 25 years ago or more.)
Yeah, it was JPEG. Like I said, learning curve. 
it was about 10 yrs ago or so. I taught film photography in the 80s.