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Ray Sachs

Ray Sachs

Legend
Location
Not too far from Philly
Name
you should be able to figure it out...
I'd like to share some of the shots I got today on a walk in a beautiful rural area under perfect blue skies with gorgeous white puffy clouds, newly green grass, and trees just sprouting their leaves for the start of the season.

I'd like to, but I can't. Because I spaced out putting the SD card back in the Df after uploading some stuff to my mac yesterday.

With any other camera I've owned in the past five years, I'd have known by the time I took my first shot that I didn't have a card in the camera. With the Df, if I'd been shooting using live view, I'd have seen it too. Or if I'd bothered to chimp even a single shot today, I'd have seen it then. But I've come to trust this camera and feel like I know how it's gonna expose. And I was out with my wife and our dog and so I was trying to stay a step ahead and I didn't chimp even ONE shot! Today is the first time that shooting with a DSLR bit me in the ass, or allowed me to bite myself in my own ass. Or something. It wasn't the camera's fault, but I choose to give it a small slice of blame anyway...

The odds are I didn't lose much of value. On incredible days like this, everything tends to look so beautiful through the OVF that I tend to shoot without putting quite as much attention into finding images rather than just taking pictures. But still, there would have been at least a few good ones that I'd have kept and one or two might have even made my end of year collection - and through those I'd have remembered the day... That's the way days like this go...

But because of my stupidity and the lack of any electronic evidence at all, I'll probably always dream of the many gallery worthy masterpieces I shot today, but failed to "capture". And, on top of which, I shot the vast majority of the day with my Zeiss 21mm f2.8, the best lens I own or have ever owned (maybe a tie with the 35 in the RX1) and NO light that ever passes through that amazing hunk of glass should ever go un-recorded, go to waste. It's a sin against nature or something.

So nope - I got nothing, nada, zip, zero, zilch, bupkis, one fewer than one, etc. Arguably, to quote Elvis Costello, LESS than zero. Zero would have been if I hadn't been shooting during the whole walk or even taken it. But shooting for the whole time and ending up with zero is somehow less yet.

Among the many and increasingly frequent mistakes I'll make in the course of the rest of my aging process, I probably won't make exactly THIS one again. I hope not. Because it kind of sucks... Not as much as a lot of stuff. But it sucks nonetheless. I'm glad I wasn't shooting somebody's wedding or graduation or 50th Anniversary party!

-Ray
 
What to say, Ray ... sounds familiar and it happened more than once so these days (I'm 50, sh.t ) I got my little silly ritual before leaving home: I check the battery level and available number of shots on the card AND the spare battery and fresh SD card (in one of those tiny boxes that come with the cards) in the Zippo department of my jeans. I never thought I'd come to a point where I need anything like this but at least it works for this old fart.
 
I'm almost 56, so I've got six years of spacing stuff out on you... For some reason, I'm always pretty diligent about batteries being charged and stuff, probably because I HAVE run out of juice while out shooting. But I'd never had any issues of this sort, so I've been more lax about my cards. Going forward, no more!

I'll just have to find something else to screw up next time... :cool:

-Ray
 
cut and pasted from a shot I posted on flickr a years back......it happened to me, too.

............. Well today I had a 2-3 hour window of time and tomorrow is the last day for entering a photo so I thought I'd run to the zoo and work on some photography in the bitter cold. I figured I could warm up in some of the buildings between shooting penguins and polar bears. There is a small penguin island right inside of the gate, so after I paid my $19 for parking and entrance I thought that would make a great first stop.

I was so glad that I brought my tripod and had actually remembered to bring the mounting plate. It wouldn't be the first time I had brought my tripod but couldn't attach the camera. There was some steam rolling off the top of the water at the penguin display as the warm water met the frigid air. I raised my camera, did a quick framing and released the shutter. This strange display came up on my LCD screen. I instantly recognized it as the "writing file to internal memory" graphic.

The penguins started laughing at me as they realized my error. I considered throwing my camera at them to let them know I was still higher up the food chain, but then thought better. I'd just go to the gift shop...I didn't really need another memory card, but I'd just pick up a small one. I remembered a time many, many years ago when I had forgotten to load film into my little Kodak 110 instamatic. That was the day I learned the difference between 100 speed and 400 speed film. I remember seeing a big display of Fuji and Kodak film vying for my young tourist dollars.

I snapped back into the present and asked the young lady unpacking a box of plush giraffes where I could find some memory cards. She looked at me so strangely I thought I was still in my daydream in front of the racks of old film. "Memory cards?....." she looked confused for another moment and saw my holding my impotent camera....."No, sorry".

"Oh well, I guess I just made a donation to the zoo", I mumbled and shuffled back to my car dejected and defeated. I waved to the girl in the booth who took my money just 10 minutes earlier and felt like an idiot for squandering the only time I'll have for the zoo in the foreseeable future.
 
Your camera quite possibly has a "shoot without card" option (that was what Canon called it) in the menus that can be turned on or off. Long time chimper here, so I haven't had the exact same thing happen to me. I HAVE taken a camera out with no memory card before and discovered the problem when I tried to take the first image. These days I get around that by leaving the card door open whenever there is no memory card in the camera (same goes for when I've removed the battery).
 
OK, I guess I'm not the only one. And maybe I got off lucky because at least I got a really pleasurable day of shooting in before I realized my goof. Would it have been better or worse if I'd figured it out after my first shot? I would have ended up with exactly the same number of final images (ie, none), but at least I got a full session of shooting in, practice though it might have turned out to be...

Oh well, lesson learned. Hopefully at least...

-Ray
 
Ray,

The Spanish have a phrase for this: El Sucko Baddo.

Is the live screen the only place that would warn you of no memory card?

On my cameras, if I removed the memory card, I leave the access hatch open.

Cheers, Jock
 
I've attempted to do this about 40 times, but the Fujis always warn me. If I'm dumb enough to have left it in my laptop somewhere else, I have 2 spare cards in the cam bag. So it's never actually stopped me from doing anything, but not because of my mental acuity.
 
The Nikon warns you, but it's a warning you might never see if you don't use live view or chimp after the shot. If I'd had an extra card in my case yesterday, I'd have never reached for it.

And, Sue, haven't you ever forgotten to load film? :cool: I think I may have - I don't recall for sure, but it seems likely given the distracted states I used to do my shooting (and most everything else) in...

-Ray
 
Oh now with FILM, yeah. I "shot" an entire roll of 3200 b&w one night last winter, froze my hands off. Got back to the bar, met up with my buddy who'd been out doing the same. "Hey hold still, lemme finish off the roll on you." Wind-click, still going. Wind-click, still more. Wind-click...wtf, where's the end of my roll Oh God No. It hadn't been loaded correctly, was still at Frame 0, nothing exposed. Calmly finished my beer, got the feeling back in my hands, sprinted around the square recreating all the shots as best I could.
 
KillRamsey said:
Oh now with FILM, yeah. I "shot" an entire roll of 3200 b&w one night last winter, froze my hands off. Got back to the bar, met up with my buddy who'd been out doing the same. "Hey hold still, lemme finish off the roll on you." Wind-click, still going. Wind-click, still more. Wind-click...wtf, where's the end of my roll Oh God No. It hadn't been loaded correctly, was still at Frame 0, nothing exposed. Calmly finished my beer, got the feeling back in my hands, sprinted around the square recreating all the shots as best I could.
Click to expand...
THAT I've definitely done. Load the film and feel enough resistance on the crank (this was when there was NOTHING electric in the cameras - maybe a tiny battery for the light meter in some of them?) to think it had loaded, but really it was jammed and you were just stripping out the little reel holes on the edge. And you'd never know it until you got to what you thought was the end of the roll... As well as occasionally ending up with triple and quadruple exposures on the last frame. Fun with film!

-Ray
 
Sorry to read about your trouble today.

With film cameras I never felt confident that I'd caught the tongue of the film in the take-up spool properly, and that when I used the frame advance lever the film was actually being pulled across the back of the camera correctly. So I always gently took up any slack in the film canister with the rewind crank before I advanced the film up to the first numbered shot, while watching that left side reel rotate as the film was drawn out of it. That gave me confidence that I was indeed pulling the film through the camera.

-R
 
Ray,
I've never done that but thanks for the perspective! (y)
As a Dƒ owner myself you've pretty much hit on the head one reason why I like it.....
But I've come to trust this camera and feel like I know how it's gonna expose.
Click to expand...

Dƒ can also mean "different". Perhaps this is why it's still such a polarizing camera - you either like it or you don't.
 
Went back yesterday - these are a few that I WOULD have made on Sunday...

17122334500_31dc0b2d2a_h.jpg
Ches Len Walk-9-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

17122330540_7e9083bb6d_h.jpg
Ches Len Walk-45-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

16687423184_8cd95fdef7_h.jpg
Ches Len Walk-20-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

16689624013_78b63130b3_h.jpg
Ches Len Walk-22-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr

And a couple from a nearby horse farm. According to one of the farmhands, this frisky little buy with the spot on his forehead was sired by Smarty Jones, who's a Chester County horse and is providing his stud services at a farm nearby. Tough life...

17308035992_839c8f9b02_h.jpg
Foal season by ramboorider1, on Flickr

16689626793_4bcba665b2_h.jpg
Foal season by ramboorider1, on Flickr

17102441087_6cdccf6256_h.jpg
Foal season by ramboorider1, on Flickr

-Ray
 
love the foals. My sister-in-law was Smarty Jones "personal assistant" for a couple years after the derby. She worked at Three Chimneys farm and booked tours of the farm and made appointments for Smarty. She even would answer some "fan mail". She said it was incredible the number of people who loved Smarty Jones and would write letters "to him".
 

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