Sometimes, sadly, "the camera you have with you" just isn't enough.
I was walking home from work today across 55th Street in Manhattan; when I got to 7th Avenue I had a red light so I looked downtown to see if it was safe to cross...
...after a second of glancing down the dark canyon of 7th Avenue ending in the superficial carnival of light that is Times Square, I caught the barely blue lines of the towers of light spiking off to the infinite darkness of the night sky. Of course I stopped dead and tried to get that ephemeral, amazing, unspeakably moving scene with my phone but there isn't a phone in the world that could catch that almost-invisible trace across the darkness of the sky. I thought "Damn, I knew this was going to happen tonight - I should have packed my DSLR. And the 1.8 lens. And the tripod." Of course even with all my gear, it would have taken a ten-stop bracket and some serious HDR merging to catch it...yet while I'm upset I didn't make a record of the moment, I somehow feel good that it's one of those things that only the eye can see, and only memory can record.
But hot damn it would have been a ringer for the "Lines" contest 
= new reply since forum marked as read
but often those moments of seeing pure joy can be lost if trying to catch it" with a camera
