No that is not just an excuse to use another Etihad MC airplane picture. It describes what has been going on all month. The sensation will probably be familiar to a lot of photographers.
During this time I have had the printer go seriously bad overnight...black ink not printing...and seen it condemned by the repair agents as a dead head. This involved a quote for $ 1100 repair. I reluctantly decided to decline this and to take it home to save up for a new one. When I hooked it up at home just to see if it could be coaxed to print red or blue ink I was interested to see that it was back to printing perfect blacks. I've since completed a dozen and a half wildly colourful A3+ prints for an exhibition. And all this on just the quote fee and a cup of coffee.
Next, I found that the main house computer had quit dead. A grey sad screen and forlorn question mark were all that was left of the hard drive. The Apple people were sympathetic and made $ 2000 sympathetic noises. Not surprising then that I listened carefully to an authorised repair shop when they told me that it could be re-drived ( re-driven...? ) for a modest sum. And with more memory than before. From the depths to the heights.
Finally, the sure fire backup computer that was to take over when the main one failed....failed. It is being repaired at the same time for a modest fee by the same shop.
In the meantime I have canvassed the opinions of very experienced digital photographers about the next move and will follow their advice. It is good to have consultants who do the business but are not in the business of giving you the business. If they were, I'd give them my business...
Note to the curious - the printer is an Epson, the computers are iMac and Macbook Pro. This post is being typed on a Macbook pro lent to me by the IT department at the shop. Nice device, but a lot newer and not equipped with my normal editing programs - the images may be a little jumpy.
Were we always as dependent upon the careful meshing of the cogs in the analog photography days? Possibly - if you burned out an enlarger bulb on Sunday night you were not going to get any more printing done until Monday. And running out of dev/stop/fix/paper/film/water/clothespegs/patience was always a possibility. Summer heat did no good for a darkroom worker, much as it does no good for the average computer. But I cannot remember a single month when 3 major systems went ker-phut all at once.
I've checked all the mirrors in the house and they are all intact. And the neighbours are all alive, so it can't be that. I'm going to look under the car for traces of blood and black cat hair...
