Category: Photography

No Time For Photos

Life, Photography

Today is Wednesday. Usually, this would mean I’d be posting some fun or interesting photo I took for Wordless Wednesday. Sadly, I don’t have any photos to post. I don’t mean that I don’t have any fun or interesting photos. I mean I have *NO* photos at all.

The past week or so has been hectic.  Between room cleaning, snow and ice clearing, freelance work, a website I had an idea for and the various other “normal life” things that take up my time, I’ve had no time or energy to wield my camera as of late.

I’ve seen plenty of things that would make for great photos: colorful, cloud marked skies, snow covered trees, cars that haven’t been moved in weeks which are buried in snow, sparkling ice on a bush.  However, as I’m noticing these things I’m either driving (stopping in the middle of the highway to take a picture of the sky isn’t too safe) or running late (if I need to drop NHL off to school in 5 minutes, I’m not going to stop to take sparkling ice photos).

Hopefully, things will calm down in the next week or so and I can resume taking photos again.  I need to practice with this camera as much as I can because I’ll be taking tons of photos when we go to Disney World!

Disney on Ice Disasters of the Photographic Kind

Disney, Photography, Stress

It was supposed to be a wonderful night.  We were going to see Disney on Ice’s Toy Story 3.  I had packed my new DSLR and made sure I had a bunch of extra memory cards.  The kids were psyched as were we.  We got there early, wandered around and finally took our seats.  As the show began, we were dazzled by the toys dancing on the ice.  The kids were mesmerized.  What could ruin such a fantastic experience?

Batteries.

During the intermission, I noticed that my batteries were running low.  No problem.  I had packed 2 sets of spares.  Be prepared, right?  Except my first backup set reported that it was low on charge.  Now I began to get nervous and popped in the second set.  Also low.  Suddenly, I remembered that these were rechargeable batteries fresh from the package and I should have maybe charged them before tossing them in my bag.  The good news was that I had non-rechargeable batteries ready to go… The bad news was that they were back at home.  (As B is fond of reminding me, she told me over and over to pack them and I kept putting it off thinking I had 2 perfectly good pairs in there.)

If the story ended here, I would be bemoaning not being able to take photos for the rest of the show, but I’d be showing you some of the wonderful shots I got.  So why are there no shots?  Easy.  My batteries were low but Lots-O’-Huggin’ Bear had just taken the stage.  I *had* to have a shot of the strawberry scented stuffed bear so I set my camera, took a photo, and… my camera shut off.  Oh well.  I started my camera back up to see if I got the photo and my camera reported “CARD NOT FORMATTED.”

Wait, WHAT?!!  What about the other hundred or so photos I just took?  Were they gone for good?

I sat during the next half of the show trying to enjoy it as much as possible, but looming over the whole rest of the production was the dark cloud of data loss.  When I got home, and got the kids into bed, I confirmed that the card reported as not formatted in Windows as well.

I went to some forums I know of (and Twitter) and posted a desperate cry for help.  Responses came in, but program after program failed to find my photos.  Finally, I found one that did, except for two things.  First of all, it required me to pay $40 to extract the found photos (no problem here).  Secondly, it reported that the photos were between 25KB and 160KB.  DSLR’s take much larger photos.  My other shots from the camera were easily 2MB or more.

I’m not giving up yet, but I’m really frightened that I may have lost all of my photos.  I guess I should look on the bright side.  At least this happened at Disney on Ice and not Disney SM Moms this March!

Big Photographical Step

NHL, Photography

Last night, I took a big photographical step.  For years, I’ve been interested in photography.  I had purchased a Panasonic digital camera that, while a Point & Shoot, could also be used in Manual mode similar to a DSLR.  I’ll admit that I relied on Automatic too much, but I had fun playing around with macro photography, different filters and other features.

Then, I went to BlogHer and got to try out someone’s DSLR.  We all know how that went.  I just had to have a DSLR, but money’s too tight to simply ditch my perfectly working Point & Shoot camera, right?  Well, about a week ago, I went to take some photos of the kids sleeping and noticed that the flash wasn’t firing.  Yes, my camera’s flash had up and died. The camera still took nice photos provided the lighting was good, but that just doesn’t cut it.  I take too many indoor, low light scenes to rely on a non-flash enabled camera.

So I looked around, asked some knowledgeable people I know, wavered back and forth, and finally took the plunge.  The Pentax K-x that I ordered from BeachCamera.com should arrive here within a week’s time.  Until then, I’m going to be refreshing my e-mail repeatedly looking for the "It’s Shipped, here’s the tracking number" e-mail.  After that, I’ll be refreshing the tracking website to see how close I am to being able to take photos with my new DSLR.

And what of my flash-dead Point and Shoot?  Don’t worry.  It’s not going to be simply tossed in the trash.  I have – oh god – a plan.  (Sorry.  Just had an 80’s "Perfect Strangers" flashback.)  I’m going to give that camera to NHL to use.  No, he won’t be able to use it whereever and whenever he wants, but I will allow him to use it to come with me on photographic journeys.  I’ll use it with him to teach him about cameras, how they work and how to take photos with them.  He is seven years old now and I think this is the perfect age for me to teach him about my obsession hobby.

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