I have not yet been run over by a car. In fact, I can happily say that it hasn’t even been a near thing.

When you really get involved with photography, you start looking for unusual angles and interesting perspectives. Quite a bit of the time, this involves bizarre contortions, adept balancing and (if you’re really lucky) a good spotter who will watch your back or hold onto you in steep places while you tunnel visualize through the viewfinder.

Such was the case in the above shot. I had tried to frame the church in the gates while crouching down and it just wasn’t working. John and Katherine were off ahead, wandering around and I was left with two bouncy dogs and a camera. Hitching the dogs to the fence (just out of frame), I paced back and forth, looking for some sort of slightly different shot of this oft-photographed church. Completely different was out of the cards for this trip; having to wrangle dogs and camera gear limits the parameters a little and time was tight. I thought, however, that I might be able to get something a little nicer than the prosaic shot of the church side-on. So I crouched down out in front. And down. And downer.

No luck. The gate still chopped off the steeple tip.

I switched to the wide-angle lens, hoping to gain an advantage that way by being able to creep closer to the gate and get under it, while still getting everything in and it sort of worked. Not quite, though, and desperate times called for desperate measures.

Vehicular traffic was very light, so I was able to back out into the road carefully. Pedestrians were everywhere, though, so each time I thought I might have a good shot, someone walked into or out of the church or across the front of my shot. I started contemplating charging tourists for photos of their legs. Just when things looked good tourist-wise, a rare car would cruise by and I had to get off the road.

Finally I dragooned a random tourist into watching out for and stopping cars for me while I lay full-length in the road on my stomach to get that shot. We had a pleasant chat about my insanity, during which she asked if I did this sort of thing often and I enumerated the number of times I had found myself face-down before a church with a camera. She eventually wandered on, shaking her head slightly in bemusement at either Newfoundlanders or photographers (not sure which).

The second shot was also taken with the wide angle, but off the road, on nice, cushy grass.