The Opposite Of Having Fun Is Having Not Fun

It's Also known as Not Working.

And you'll encounter this all through your digital photographic experience. You also encountered it all through your analog time too, but to a greater extent. You could fall down the analog stairs in the dark quicker and it hurt more when you hit the bottom.

Why? Because there were a lot of those falls from which there was no recovery. When you made a real mistake with exposure or film handling or development or fixing, whatever you had done until then went well and truly out the window. I've got slides exposed in my first days of 35mm shooting that make me cry - mistakes that wasted opportunities. I can also remember darkroom errors that killed whole photo shoots - and they could be as simple as mis-reading dilution tables for the chemistry.

Okay - you could do it royally with digital as well - you can format off an entire card and make everything disappear. However, the camera generally makes this harder by one step of permission before it will obey - some do it in several steps because they know what you are like.

You can also lose computer work - as much by you own button-pressing error as by equipment failure. Fortunately there may be backups and spare images on cards to save you. You'll lose time and face but not blood.

The real Not Work/Not Fun is errors on the part of the equipment that are internal - and may not be able to be fixed. Apparently there are lenses like that now - good sturdy mid-range zooms that have been staples of professional use for years, that are failing due to internal component wear. The Not Fun of it is the fact that the supply line for spare parts for these has dried up - it may be a virus-related shortage - and the lenses are parked as useless for the foreseeable future. As our technician says "Don't shoot us piano players. It's not our fault ".

I have a patent remedy for single-piece equipment failure. This can be applied whenever a paid job arises - and it has been on tow occasions in the past. I take a second body complete with a general-purpose lens in the bag. It is set precisely the same as the primary worker body and has a clean card ready to fill up if No.1 goes down.

It need not be precisely the same body, but it needs to have the same sensor type and look though the same sort of glass. Then you can match up rescue files taken with it to the main ones. You may have to juggle numbers, but you'll have the images.