Sometimes when catching quick shots of subjects who aren't holding still, we news photogs lay on the shutter if we merely think we could've-maybe-kinda-almost saw a good moment. We place the focusing spot on the subject, fire several rapid frames, maybe rethink whether or not the exposure settings are good, and the viewfinder flickers as we see only fleeting glimpses of what might be good shots.

In other words, when things are happening fast, we instinctively jump, doing several things at once, many images flying by in the viewfinder, and don't really get a chance to scrutinize any one of them as they are recorded.

Sometimes we know we got a good shot, sometimes we're sure we didn't, and often we're not sure, so we might stop and "chimp", which is a goofy term-of-art for checking the shot on the camera's screen.

But when at a live event, there's also an incentive to not take the time to stop and look at the frames, either. For example, when we're shooting a parade we often guess that we didn't see a good enough image in the viewfinder, and rather than check the shot, we abandon it and move on.

That's what I did when shooting the junior daffodil parade last weekend, and I didn't realize that I had gotten such a cute shot of the girl above. In the viewfinder I saw that she quickly moved from head-buried-in-hood, to face fully out of the hood. But this one frame with just one eye peering out didn't register in my brain and I didn't bother to stop and scrutinize the frames I had just shot, so I likewise didn't stop to get her name for a caption.

So the picture never appeared in the paper. It was the one that got away.

But we're a little looser about captions in photo galleries, so her image lives on in the gallery I posted that afternoon.