 |
| It's been a while since I've posted a railroad-oriented image. Amtrak train #145 passing the old Norfolk and Western passenger station in Suffolk, Virginia. The contraption in the foreground on the right is a propane fueled switch heater to keep the switches from freezing in the winter. In the past, a crew was sent out to clear snow and defrost switches when frozen. (click to enlarge) Nikon Z7II; 24-120mm f/4 lens @ 48mm; 1/1000th sec. @ f/11; ISO 640 |
I've been seriously photographing for a long time. A really long time. Fifty-two years, in fact. You would think by now, with all of the experience I've had, how much I've read, studied others, listened to advice in every aspect of photography, that by now I would be able to go on a road trip or just go out and photograph and not make any stupid mistakes. Well, you would think, wouldn't you? Somehow it doesn't seem to work that way. In my own defense, I'll say, "I'm human. I make mistakes. I'm not perfect." Do you think that absolves me of my past mistakes?
For your reading pleasure, here are some of the stupid mistakes I can remember making. I'm sure there were many more but here are a few that might amuse you. I think most of them are funny now but weren't so funny at the time.
1) My wife and I had planned a two week trip to Alaska. I studied and read and carefully planned as to what photo gear I would take. I even struggled over whether to take a tripod or a monopod. Bag selection was critical as well. A couple of days before the trip, I had everything packed into my bag, checked and double-checked to make sure I didn't forget anything. Thumbs up. Good to go. As sometimes happens I started second guessing my self and at the last minute, I decided to change bags and take a different one. I moved everything over to the new bag. Early the next morning we left.
After arriving in Alaska after a long, long day from the east coast, we settled into our hotel room. The following day we started touring various places and I photographed our adventures, as usual. That night I uploaded all of the day's photos onto a Western Digital My Passport Wireless portable hard drive (you don't need a computer as it has it's own electronics and SD card slot) and my plan was to take enough memory cards so that I didn't have to reformat them and reuse them as I wasn't taking a laptop or extra backup drives. The cards themselves would be my second backup copies of my images. (Also, my camera at the time had only one card slot) That is when I realized (this is where the ominous music comes in), I had only the memory card that was in the camera! What? Where is the pouch with all of the other memory cards? I looked everywhere frantically and finally resigned myself that I must have left it in the original bag. Yes, I had left the pouch with the other memory cards in one of the small pockets of the other bag and somehow missed it when transferring my gear. What to do? I asked a hotel guy to drive me to the Fairbanks Walmart and they had one memory card. Only one and it was slow. However, at least I had a second one if the other failed. That was my biggest fear. If my card failed, no photographs at all. It turned out that I never needed to open or use the Walmart memory card so when I returned home to Virginia, I returned it to Walmart for a refund. In the end, no harm/no foul but my own stupidity could have cost me once-in-a-lifetime photographs. Talk about stress!
2) I was out photographing in the countryside one day using my Canon F-1 film camera and prime lenses. (I did shoot with Canon at times and I used to use only prime lenses) I was standing on the side of the small country lane and decided I needed a different focal length. I took my 50mm f/1.4 Canon lens off the camera and, while trying to replace it with a 35mm lens, the 50mm lens slipped out of my hands, hit the dirt and I helplessly stood there and watched it roll down into the brown, opaque water-filled ditch and disappear. Hurriedly, I reached into the dirty water, felt around and found the lens. It was full of the dirty ditch water. There was no weather sealing back then. I knew what I had to do. I drove home as quickly as possible. I rinsed the lens out repeatedly in fresh water and then placed it into a plastic container and secured the lid. I sent the lens to Canon USA in the water filled container where they repaired it and it worked fine afterwards. Clumsiness costs money!
3) When on a road trip or when out photographing locally, my normal procedure is to upload all of my day's photos to Lightroom making a backup copy on at least one other hard drive. My LR catalog is set up by geographic location—folders for each of the 50 states, with subfolders named as cities, towns or counties as well as special places like national parks within each of the states. When I import the day's images, they are usually from several different locations. That means I have to make multiple imports from each card as each import to a specific location is keyworded. On two occasions, after photographing in multiple locations and evidently, when uploading my image files, I missed importing the images from one of the day's locations. Only a few days later when I wanted to look at the images, did I realize that they weren't in my LR catalog. They weren't on either of the backup hard drives and the memory cards, by that time, had been reformatted several times. How could I miss a location? I have done my imports this way for years and years and have the system down pat. Or so I thought. Not all was lost, thankfully. Due to the wonders of technology, I was able to recover all of the images from one of the trips (even though, as I mentioned, the card had been reformatted a few times, which really surprised me) using the recovery software by the card's manufacturer. The other occasion, I had no idea. I had loaded the images from earlier in the day (from Illinois) and later in the day (from Colorado), but somehow missed the images I made in a small town in Kansas. Again, sloppiness costs.
4) Another well planned three week road trip west to the Tetons and Yellowstone and back to the east coast. I had carefully figured out all of the gear I wanted to take, which bag, tripod and what accessories. After driving five days from eastern Virginia to the Tetons, my wife and I were driving along and I spotted a nice copse of Aspens with beautiful yellow/gold leaves which I wanted to photograph. They were a considerable distance from the roadway so I needed to use my Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens to make the images. When I went to attach the lens to the tripod, the lens foot was missing. I looked and looked and couldn't find it anywhere. After thinking about it for the rest of the day, I realized, like Alaska, I had switched camera bags at the last minute and I thought the only place the lens foot could be was in one of the small pockets in the other bag. I called my daughter who drove to our home and found it in the bag. I asked her to FedEx it to me at our hotel in Jackson, Wyoming and that little mistake cost me about $40 US to have it shipped. I did go back an get my photographs but another blunder that could have been worse. Why didn't I just attach the camera to the tripod? The rule that I learned long ago is that if the manufacturer supplies a foot with the lens it is too heavy for the camera's lens mount to hold the weight without risk of bending it. I wasn't willing to take that risk.
5) In the summer of 1972, I enrolled in two courses at a college in Wyoming. The courses were Rocky Mountain Field Geology (I was a geology major) and Rocky Mountain Field Botany. The courses were given in conjunction with the university I attended and five of us geology students planned to ride out together in one of the student's old Chevy van. We all met at a central location to leave on the trip. I had my cousin drive me to that location. A day into the trip, I realized I had left my camera and lenses on the backseat of my cousin's car. 1972. No cell phones. No way to communicate. After arriving in Wyoming, I called my dad and asked him to send it to me, which he promptly did. Unfortunately, my much younger sister had gotten hold of my camera and jammed the shutter/film wind mechanism. What my dad sent me was essentially a brick. I got a ride into Cody, Wyoming and the guy at the camera store told me he would send if off to be fixed and let me know when it returned. Well, I spent the 8 or 9 weeks in Wyoming and Montana, Yellowstone and the Tetons in some of the most beautiful scenery on earth and didn't get a single photograph. I was back home in Pennsylvania when the camera store guy called me and told me my camera was ready to be picked up. So many opportunities lost because I forgot the camera. NOTE: On a return trip to Yellowstone in 2012, I took that same old Minolta SRT-101 and 50mm lens and make a number of photographs with it as recompense for not having it the first time. The photos were okay but didn't compare to those from my 36mp Nikon D800E. It was startling as to how much better the digital photos were as compared to the film photos I made alongside.
6) On a winter Sunday evening, I walked over to the nearby river to make a sunset photograph. We had lived in our home for almost twenty years and I had never thought of making a photo of the sunset over the river with some boat houses in the foreground. (I had photographed so many sunsets years ago that, for the most part, they lost appeal for me unless there was some interesting subject that I wanted to include) The river bank was lined with huge slabs of granite to act as rip rap and keep the bank from eroding. As I stood with my left foot on a steeply angled slab of granite and composed my image, my shoe lost its grip and started sliding down toward the water. I tried to catch myself so I would fall and at the same time, the camera started juggling in my hands. The end result was the Nikon D700 and 20mm f/2.8 AF-D lens first bouncing off a corner of a rock (front lens element first) then landing in the shallow water at the river's edge. I couldn't believe it as I watched the bubbles emerge to the surface as water replaced air in the camera and lens. Being digital, the camera was lost. The lens' front element was severely damaged. The lens was filled with brackish water as well. Luckily, I had a separate insurance policy of all my gear as I was shooting a lot of stock at the time and the insurance company replaced both at no cost to me. But I loved that Nikon D700. Great camera.
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Forgetfulness and clumsiness? Luckily neither has happened since. Fingers crossed.
7) Lastly, there were several cameras I've owned that I really loved using and to which I became attached. I sold almost all of those for financial reasons as, for most of my adult life, I was not in a financial position to acquire a new camera and not sell an older one. I regret selling some of those but that is life. Looking back I think it was a mistake to sell a couple of those cameras as I did a lot of good work with them and they just worked perfectly for me. Did you ever sell a camera which you now regret?
Those are some of my many blunders that come to mind. I'm sure I made others. Hopefully, I've learned my lessons and not make the same stupid mistakes in the future.
Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.
Thanks for looking. Enjoy!
Dennis A. Mook
All content on this blog is © 2013-2023 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.
No comments:
Post a Comment