Archives for July 2007

Also known as when good technology goes dreadfully wrong.
Also known as, the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day [week].
The D100 packed it in with ‘mirror issues at a recent work ‘Big Thing”. It’s a DSLR so it has a mirror that flips up out of the way when you depress the shutter. This is a good thing. It is a bad thing when the mirror doesn’t go back down when the shutter closes and so it went of to camera hospital to be repaired.
And it came back repaired but with a whole new problem; as in now the on board flash doesn’t work which isn’t a huge deal, actually I’m not a big fan of flash photography. (This is partly because I don’t know how to do it well and because I think it makes people look pasty and as though they just got a big fright.) Anyway, NOT having the on board flash working can still be a bit of a pain even for a non fan, so I had to send it back for more repairs which is an even bigger pain really. So I’m still shooting my 365 pictures with the baby Canon and I don’t like it, no I don’t.
Happily, even though I was sans Nikon when my last paid picture taking gigs came round my good friend Cove lent me her Canon DSLR (and (gasp) I actually liked that one. I know, I’m hopelessly brand disloyal, let’s face it I’ve tricked out my Mac so it behaves like a PC, do I really care about any kind of Canon/Nikon loyalty?? No, I have Nikon because my first camera was one and I don’t want to have to buy new lenses to suit a new body…)
So, there I am with a wad of pictures that need tweaking and editing and burning to discs for the women’s dept so what do I do? I burn them onto my back up hard disc, an external one that I carry everywhere. My safety net, my portable life and I leave them there because I have a v busy week prepping for another ‘Big Thing’ at work and I plan to manage those photos and send out my month’s invoices over the weekend.
But that wonder drive, that hard disk I always have with me… that portable life, is the one I dropped off the arm of the sofa onto the floor.
That drive was the one that was still going at the time.
The one that wasn’t going when I picked it up.
Fuck Fuck Fuckety Fuck. (Sorry, it really was a bad day… some days there are just no other suitable words.)
It’s days like those in which your life flashes before your very eyes and force you to sift through your mind to try and recall exactly what it was you lost.
And then you start to breathe again, because you have all your photos on disc as well as hard disc because you are a pragmatist and a practical girl and because most clients commission disc copies. So you make 4 for them and one for you, just to be safe… So the hard drive really was a back stop and an easy access archive.
And then you remember those blog illustrations you spent ages working on and you are crushed because when you finally found them on that drive you were relieved, knowing that they did still exist somewhere but as you’d searched everywhere for them another time and you knew that the HD was the ONLY place they were, but they weren’t business pix, they really were just for fun so you figure, you might just about get over it eventually.
But even so, you spend hours surfing Google to see if you can find the originals.
But they are.
[Sob]
Gone.
Then you remember the last lot of pix you transferred to the drive were a commission, worth a bit of cash and you remembered that you…
Don’t.
Have.
Them.
Anywhere.
Else.
And you know the client is going to
Be.
Very.
Upset.
And you feel absolutely certain that you wiped them off the SD card before you returned the camera to its owner but you email her just to be sure and ask her to check to see if there are photos still on the card.
And then you hear she’s lent her camera to someone else to shoot this latest Big Thing.
And so you panic.
And then you get her email saying that, no, you didn’t wipe the card before returning it and she didn’t give it to the latest photographer and so the photos are safe. A miracle of epic proportions considering how much of a pedant you usually are about leaving things in better shape than they were when you borrowed them…
And you thank your lucky stars and offer up a bit of a praise because you know that deep down…
Jesus loves you just enough to save your sorry arse.
(And no, I still haven’t finished Harry. I’m up to the bit where Najini nearly kills…)