The Yellow Lorry Syndrome

I call it the 'Yellow Lorry Syndrome'.

In fact, it's just another version of Murphy's Law (which says: If something can go wrong, it will).

But my version of it comes from a time when I was photographing Mosi oa Tunya (otherwise known as the Victoria Falls) in Livingstone, Zambia.

There are billions of photographs of these magnificent waterfalls out there, the vast majority taken from the same old viewpoints. I wanted something different.

So I went back in to town and found a spot where the main street stretches away down to the Zambezi River with the spray of the Falls rising in the distance. I fitted a long telephoto lens to compress the perspective and put the camera on a tripod. Unlike the British police, the Zambian bobbies didn't seem too bothered by cameras tripods, even though there was a bush war raging just across the Falls in Rhodesia at that time.

I was about to take the carefully-composed picture when a large yellow lorry drew to a halt directly in front of me and the driver proceeded to unload the contents. He was there so long that I packed up, and returned in the afternoon (when, of course, the light wasn't so good for the spray).

But there is an upside. Sometimes yellow lorries can be fortuitous ...


(Technical note: This was also taken with a telephoto lens which has had the effect of compressing perspective.)