STICKY:  Classic Blunders of the Camera Kind

here is a "stun arse " moment .Just unpacked a pair of yongnuo 622"s. heart racing ,,fingers trembling,, mind going million miles a second ,, (keep in mind that i am a total newb to photography),I"m too excited to read any damn manual,so i stick the batteries in both ,turn them on ....nothing happens.I remember reading that you might have to turn the batteries to make a good contact so i do that ,,nothing.oh no ,now what, i decide the batteries are dead ,,so i try them in the charger ....nope ,they are charged, DAMN,,(I really dont want to read the manual).Maybe I"m not getting a good contact on the hotshoe....no,,good contact.Oh darn ,they sent me a bunch of crap,I"ll send them back. While taking the batteries out,i notice something odd.In all of my 56 years,when putting batteries in a device the wire spindle always take the negative side of the battery,while on these triggers ,i notice , thats correct for one battery compartment , the other side ,the spindle takes the positive side. so I try that route, hit the on button ...instant reponse from the trigger,,(thank god hehe).Shove it all together ,take a test shot with my trusty xsi ,and everything is hunky dory.i guess i should say,,Damn it!! calm down and read the manual!!!hahahaaha

Wasn't it Ralph waldo Emerson who is quoted as saying "If everything else fails read the instructions"?

ewheeler20 wrote in post #15722021
Here is a potential one:
https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1283865
The OP wanted to know why his 7 year old 30D and kit lens couldn't take nice photos of an airplane MANY miles up in the air... and then scrolling through the thread you can see the OP shooting down all of the very valid opinions (as to why the quality sucked) by the experienced transportation and aviation photographers on this forum. Some people will never learn...

That's not a blunder - that just plain pig headedness.
His questions haven't got any better, neither has his ability to accept perfectly good and valid advice.

so true ...so true..I will grow up one day,,hopefully not too soon though

growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional...

Another contender...
https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1330941

From today: 1dx won't fit 70-200 v2

Hello everyone I am a newbie and this is my first post and its a cry for help. Not only am I a newbie I am also a beginner with digital photography. I purchased a Canon EOS 350D second hand last year and it worked fine. I then decided to explore a little moving the knobs and catches, I moved the AM setting to MF but did not change the automatic setting on the Mode dial. I pressed the button and now the camera is not working like it used to do. Can anyone help me please. It shows Err .05 at the bottom of the view finder and the shutter does not operate.

Hi Laverton. Welcome to POTN.

You might want to start a new thread in the Camera forum https://photography-on-the.net/forum/forumdis​play.php?f=9.

This thread is a Specialty" thread meant to poke good-natured fun at those of us who do things with our gear that we should know better than to do.

Perhaps the moderators can move your post to a new thread. You'll probably get more replies that way.

Laverton wrote in post #17260991
Hello everyone I am a newbie and this is my first post and its a cry for help. Not only am I a newbie I am also a beginner with digital photography. I purchased a Canon EOS 350D second hand last year and it worked fine. I then decided to explore a little moving the knobs and catches, I moved the AM setting to MF but did not change the automatic setting on the Mode dial. I pressed the button and now the camera is not working like it used to do. Can anyone help me please. It shows Err .05 at the bottom of the view finder and the shutter does not operate.

Does the camera click three times before the ERR05?

I had a 350D and got some mud on the pop up flash. The flash was stuck in the down position. When i pressed the shutter, the camera tried three times to pop up the flash and then went into an error. I had to shut it off and back on again to clear the error.

There is a switch/sensor that tells the camera the flash opened next to the flash. If the flash does pop up, check the back of the flash recess and see if there is anything keeping it held down.

Blunders? How about forgetting ones Camera was on the top of the car and taking off.

Oh man! did it this week. Only a 250.00 loss as it was a Canon SX50

Not quite as bad as my 430EX battery blunder...but I went out to shoot some night street photography in Seoul this evening, and when I got there, I turned on the camera and got "NO CARD"...left it in my card reader...

And then . . .

another nominee: https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1464757

I was photographing a k9 nosework trial (its the dog sport version of what bomb and drug sniffing dogs do), when I was nearing the end of my first sd card so I swapped in an empty card and kept shooting away. A little while later there was a lull and I took a moment to review my images. To my horror the images I had taken looked super out of whack. it was all fine the last time I checked them. I go over all my settings and everything looks perfectly fine. Then I realized I had Magic Lantern isntalled on this card, so I go into the ML options and there it is. Turns out last time I used this card I was playing around with the dualiso feature. That wouldn't be too bad, but the settings I left it at were completely inappropriate. Even after running it through the command line program to process the dualiso raw files it was still completely overexposed. I figured out there was a debug flag to dump the lower iso image by itself. Problem is you can only do those debug flags on a single image at a time, and I had taken over 200 photos before I noticed anything was off. So I spent a couple hours learning powershell scripting to run each photo through the converter program with the debug flags, move and rename the low iso file all automatically.

Here it is if anyone else finds them self in the same situation, lol.

$export = "J:\Import me\export"
$import = "J:\Import me\input"
$cr2hdr_dir = "J:\Lightroom\Plugins\​cr2hdr"

$file_list = Get-ChildItem $import *.cr2 -Recurse

cd $cr2hdr_dir

foreach ($file in $file_list)
    {
    .\cr2hdr.exe --debug-blend $import\$file
    $noext = $file.BaseName
    Move-Item -Path "fullres_smooth.dng" -Destination "$export\$noext.dng"
    }