CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

A photographer brings their camera.

bkinnie Loc: Pennsylvannia, living in Florida

I was shooting a civil war re-enactment. I was swapping out lenses as the battle raged on. Apparently during the last swap, I didn't lock my lense into the body and some light leaked onto the last 15 or 20 pictures I took. I noticed the problem, fixed it and took a few more pictures. The last few came out fine.

AGO

When I was younger, I worked part-time as a sports photographer for a local newspaper. In that capacity I worked all home games for our NFL team. One rule in shooting football is to never lose track of the guy with the ball. During one game I lost track of the punt returner until he ran to the sidelines and knocked me on my ass. It was caught on national TV where all of my friends and relatives saw it. It was rather embarrassing. Fortunately, none of my equipment was damaged.

maxlieberman Loc: 19027

I just did the dumb this weekend. I formatted the wrong card and lost a week's worth of shooting, including some of my best ever bif pictures.

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

MY biggest "dumb camera mistake" -- I wouldn't call it my "favorite" -- occurred near the end of the first cruise that my soon-to-be wife and I took back in September 2006. She turned for the night early, and I went back out to wander around the ship. Upon my return to the stateroom, I stayed outside and was deleting extra and redundant photos I had taken with our little Canon A3400 point-and-shoot.

The normal procedure is to select the individual photo and press the "trash can" button to delete. Fine, got that. Apparently I was moving a bit too fast and inadvertently hit the "Delete All" button onscreen. I'm watching as the "frame counter" counts back down to ZERO. The info screen showed "No Images". UH-OH!!!! If I go back into the room and tell her I just lost ALL of our photos, the relationship is over!

BUT… I'm not that tech-savvy with computers, but I know enough that today's modern cameras are basically small computers with a lens attached. I know enough that if you accidentally delete a file (or multiple files) that your chances of data recovery are very good provided that you DO NOT DO ANYTHING ELSE. I knew that the DATA (e.g., the photos) were really still there on the SD card and that only the "directory" was deleted. The camera THINKS it has no photos, but they're really still there.

The next morning, I went to the ship's Photo Desk and explained my predicament. The photo guy said he should be able to fix us up but it would take some time and he'd get back to us by the end of the day. Sure enough, not only was he able to recover ALL of the images I had taken, but he saved them all onto a CD disk so I couldn't accidentally lose them AGAIN!

Darkroom317 Loc: Mishawaka, IN

Pulling the wrong darkslide out when shooting large format.

Forgetting to put film in the camera.

mundy-F2 Loc: Chicago suburban area

You know you are old if it i was not a re-enactment.
Mundy

bgroome

Been there. Done that. And have the Tee shirt.

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JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

Showing up to take pictures of people and discovering I brought my modified full spectrum IR Olympus EM5ii instead of my non-modified EM5ii.

joecichjr Loc: Chicago S. Suburbs, Illinois, USA

I sure know the feeling, but my teeth are much better 🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗

gwilliams6

No offense taken if you dont care to read all this, LOL

In my over five decades as a shooter including being a pro since 1974 shooting all subjects around the word, I have made about every dumb mistake you can imagine from shooting a film camera with no film properly loaded, forgetting the right and/or special gear I needed, having unknown defective gear that I didn’t know until after a shoot and more..

I have been bailed out by backup gear, borrowing from another fellow pro shooter, reshooting the assignment with a subject by claiming gear failure, dumb luck and more.

Here are just a few on my long list:

1) On assignment for Newsweek Magazine doing a special medical assignment in a operating room with top docs introducing a new special open heart procedure with a critical heart patient that gave permission to be photographed even though they could die during the procedure . I shot the entire job on transparency film in Philadelphia which was then couriered to NYC to Newsweek to be processed, edited and used on deadline for the next week’s issue.

Newsweek processed the transparencies and called me. They found out there were no images on the film. I figured out the camera’s shutter was going across, the film was advancing , but the broken shutter was not opening. I had shot freelance for Newsweek for years while on staff at the Philadelphia Inquirer and they had faith in me from many successful cover assignments for them on national stories.

So rather than can me, they moved the story to a later week and we made arrangements with the same doctors, but with another critical heart patient that agreed to do the same new procedure. The docs joked that if the second patient passed away that was on me and Newsweek, and to get it right this time. I used a new camera that I had tested, did a better lighting job the second time around, and it became a cover story in Newsweek, and the patient survived which matters the most. Whew.

2)Covering a large raging forest fire in the New Jersey Pinelands, I went out with a state firefighting crew that had been sent out to help stop the spread of the fire. I was told by the crew chief to stay within sight of the firefighting truck at all times because the wind could shift and we could have the fire come over our position. I got out the truck and proceeded to make closer and closer shots with my wide angle lens, getting great shots.

I made some shots of the firefighters working on fire breaks, then turned away and made more shots of the flames consuming the forest . Suddenly I heard the loud horn of the firefighter truck blowing. The wind had shifted, the fire had jumped our position and now we needed to leave immediately. I had been so concentrated on all the good dramatic shots I was getting, that when I looked around I was now surrounded on all sides by flames. I thought I was done for it.

Suddenly through the flames came the firefighters truck at speed, and without stopping, two firefighters grabbed me by my photo vest and hauled me into the truck, cameras banging and me bouncing as we hauled out of there. I had a six-column wide shot on the front page of my newspaper the next day and got compliments on how close the shot seemed with all the dramatic flames. Little did they know how close it came to being one of my last shots.

3)After having all my jungle gear including my canteen, netting, medical and bug stuff confiscated at the airport in Managua, Nicaragua upon my arrival, then surviving covering the war between the Contras and Sandinistas , traveling for weeks on foot with Sandinista’s Special Forces soldiers through the jungles and mountains of eastern Nicaragua near their border with Honduras, coming under fire ,and photographing the fighting and the casualties, both civilian and soldiers, then I almost drowned after making it back to Managua and celebrating with a break swimming in the Pacific Ocean and being caught in undertow .

Then at the airport back in Managua, Nicaragua to fly back to the USA, having a standoff with Sandinista soldiers pointing their Ak 47s at me when I refused to allow them to x-ray my film and ruin all the shots I had risked my life to get. (yes I had the lead-lined bags, but they wanted to x-ray the unprotected film). In my Spanish, I told them to shoot me, I wasn’t giving up my film and coming back empty-handed. The head officer of the soldiers saw my letter of cooperation from the Sandinista Government's head of defense that we had obtained to go out with their troops, and decided that publicity would not be a good thing with so many witnesses in the airport, and they probably would have been punished if they shot me, relented.

Then I get back to the USA and realize I am missing a roll of exposed film, not knowing if the lost roll had the most important shots or not. Never found that roll, but the shots I had were fine. Our published multi-part story from our two-men reporter-photographer teams that covered the war embedded with both the Contra and Sandinista sides, led to the US Senate ending all aid to the Contras and the bloody war that had claimed as many innocent civilians as soldiers, ended, and friends that we had made on both sides of the conflict and troops that had risked their lives to protect us and civilians that we had met were now safe and alive.

Remember we were embedded with and protected by the Sandinistas best special forces at the same time the USA was funding their enemies the Contras that were killing their civilians and soldiers. The Sandinistas wanted the real story out, and our story concluded the war and civilian bloodshed would end if the USA stopped funding the Contras, who were the remnants of the death squads of the hated Somoza dictatorship that the Sandinistas had fought a bloody revolution to overthrow and exile to Florida. And the story won many awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was published around the world. The Socialist Sandinistas were no choir boys but had the vast support of their population who had suffered for decades under the Somoza family dictatorships, supported by the USA for their export products like the sugar plantations that supplied Coke and Pepsi. The Sandinistas had kicked out the USA companies and nationalized their resources when they took over. As journalists we went in with teams on both sides to tell the objective story. and what we witnessed wasn't what we expected, but it was the truth.

4)A more funny one, but a good lesson learned. Five photographers and graphic artists from my newspaper decided we would do a cross-country motorcycle trip from east to west coast and back. This was before cell phones folks were more than just phones (remember those big bricks), so the newspaper said we could take staff gear to shoot with in exchange for our story to be told when we got back. As one of the riders (on my Honda 650cc Nighthawk) my job was to carry the Nikon lenses in my gear. We had a lot of stuff to take, warm weather gear for the summer heat, but also some winter clothes for the snow up at the highest altitude 12000-13000 foot Rocky Mountain routes we had planned, rain gear, as well as tools and stuff for the bikes and for an oil change half way on the trip. Another photographer on the trip was to pack the company Nikon cameras in his gear.

Well by the time we got from Philly down onto the Skyline drive in Virginia, the other photographer realized he forgot to bring the Nikon cameras, so my lenses were useless and I had no camera to use on the entire over 5000+ mile trip over a month (way too short a time). I didn’t want to spend my tight budget on new gear and I didn’t want to buy disposable cameras and live with that poor quality. Oh the forgetful photog had not forgotten to bring his own Leica rangefinder camera and a couple of lenses, so we had some quality shots from the trip, but none that I shot. Never again would I rely on any other person for my gear, I always carry backup cameras, and yes I always have my smartphone now as a last camera resource.

5) Doing a fashion shoot on kid's fashion the next year after the first Jurassic Park movie had come out, I went to my editors and proposed doing a shoot with kids in all the latest clothes in a setting with prehistoric dinosaurs. A crazy idea, but they went for it. The Natural History museum in Philly had an exhibit with animatronic dinosaurs along with their usual skeleton dinosaur exhibits. I assembled the kids, the clothes, the makeup artists and all the gear including lighting and took over the museum on a closed day. It all went well, I asked the kids not to lean on anything , but you know if you tell kids not to do something in the morning, that hours later they will do it somehow.

Near the end of our long shoots the kids were getting tired and one chose to lean against the skeleton of a huge Tyrannosaurus Rex and it started to shake, much to the horror of the Museum's PR director watching over the shoot and myself. Luckily the Rex held up and was none the worse. That could have been an expensive dumb mistake if we had knocked that down. LOL

There are tons of other stories but if any of you actually got through all of this, more power to you, and I will save those other stories for another time. Yes I could write a book on all them, LOL

Digital cameras that you can set not to fire if there is no memory card in the camera. EVFs that can show you your actual exposure settings and white balance settings before you shoot, and can show you if you got the shot or if you messed up on the spot, have all reduced many of our dumb mistakes. And the ability to transmit and/or save your work to multiple places immediately, saves a lot of anxieties of the past. And having those ever-present smartphones with their cameras adds great security that we can make a decent shot anytime and anyplace if we make any dumb mistakes with our main gear.. LOL

Cheers and best to you all.

gwilliams6

One of the published kids' fashion shots I did with the dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum, where I mentioned one of my kid models almost toppled a huge Tyrannosaurus Re, LOL It took me too long to find this shot and my earlier post was closed to edit and add it, so here it is. Shot with either one of my Nikon or Canon DSLRs ( I owned and used both brands at the same time for 40 years). Dynalight strobes used in the lighting.

Click on download to see better image quality.

Cheers and best to you all..

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Orphoto Loc: Oregon

Shooting long exposures on bulb with intervalometer and forgetting to get out from mirror up mode.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Some great stories - thanks for sharing!

Cheers