Post the DUMB things you've done under photography stress!

Headshotzx wrote in post #7109204
While shooting events, other people would ask me to help shoot a photo of them with their own p&s. I will *always* bring the p&s up to my eye level and realise that I'm looking at a big 3" LCD screen with no viewfinder.

This is especially true if I am also taking pictures with my 40D at the same time

Shot over 100 pics of about 270 @ iso 6400 while at a race meet on a bright sunny day.

pendulum15 wrote in post #7109232
Almost always when shooting with long glass people come up to me expecting it to magically be a wide angle asking me to take a group picture of them, posed less than the MFD away .... oh well

Agreed...

pendulum15 wrote in post #7109232
I always do the exact same thing...

Almost always when shooting with long glass people come up to me expecting it to magically be a wide angle asking me to take a group picture of them, posed less than the MFD away .... oh well

Some people also can't understand that prime has no zoom

at one point i only had one memory card.. a friend of mine asked to take a picture of his friend's pet.


I showed up, and voila! no memory card.. i pretended the whole time i was taking pix.

I was waiting for my friend to pick me up and take me to her house, because I was going to take her family's holiday card photos. It had been snowing a bit before so I went outside to take pictures, and right when I shut my front door I was trying to get back in. I had locked myself out with my camera, a nearly dead battery, and a 256MB card. I had a battery nearly done on the charger inside and a 1GB card too. It also started snowing a few minutes after I was outside...not fun :[

Not due to stress, just my incompetence, but i only just realised that on my 20d in Av mode if the on switch is set to the dash then the rear dial effects exposure

Spent ages taking pictures, changing the metering modes, ISO (not that that would matter) everything i could think of, but they were still overexposed, then realised it was set all the way to the right and i could move it into the center

An aviation-photography group to which I belong (shocking, ain't it?) was granted access to shoot from right next to the runway at El Centro, California last month.

I decided to get "Artsy" and wanted to try some extreme panning shots of jets landing and taking off. In order to get as slow a shutter speed as I wanted on my 5DC, I dropped my ISO to 50 and (you guessed it) promptly left it there the rest of the afternoon.

It was making me nuts trying to figure out why the exposure on one rig ( MkIII + 300 f/2.8 ) was so different than on the other ( 5DC + 70-200 f/2.8 ) Didn't hit me until I was d'loading images late that night and looked at the EXIF.

The real kick in the head: None of the "extreme" panning shots worked...

D'oh!

Was setting up the seamless, realized I had ordered the wrong one but tried it out anyway (9' crossbar with an 8.9 foot roll). Had a client coming in 10 minutes..Two clients actually, one after the other and then another at 6. Had it set up perfect and went to go check my lighting bag..boom ! Look behind me and the stand gave way, falling through the seamless and ruining it...which unrolled..and unrolled...and unrolled.

Desperate and not sure what to do I managed to find a saw. The stand was okay, but the background was screwed. About 1/3 of it was ripped so I figured I would saw it down to use the other 2/3 and then be okay to use it for small portraits...sawed and sawed really fast...and then realized the inner tube was reinforced with a plastic middle.

"*#!*!"

So then I had a worthless seamless background, two stands and a crossbar laying everywhere..quickly ended up calling the first client and rescheduled for 2 weeks later, then the 2nd and the third.

Theoretically I probably could have unrolled the roll to the point where it wasn't ripped, then cut across the way to tear off maybe about 10 feet or so of the paper to use on the crossbar, rather than the whole thing.

Moral of the story: Don't make snap, creative decisions under stress involving sharp objects.

LOL!! I love this thread. I'm so glad someone resurrected it. It's nice to not feel "alone" when I do something totally boneheaded.

Karl Johnston wrote in post #9159824
Moral of the story: Don't make snap, creative decisions under stress involving sharp objects.

A life lesson even if you remove the "Creative" aspect...

I'm learning from YOUR mistakes! I'm sure I'll make one of my own though.

lol this thread is way too awesome to not resurrect it again

i set the camera on a tripod, connected it to the pc, set up gphoto2 to take a picture every 10 seconds for an hour to make a timelapse. one hour later i learned that the option "--capture-image" means it will capture the image. capture, not save it, neither on pc nor on the card...

only good thing was that this was a test on my balcony, so the test did what it should do: expose what i had done wrong. sucks for the 360 clicks on the shutter count though.

oh no. LOL!!

actually i have an even better one... went through the whole city for an airblower, all i could get was some compressed air can... you guessed it, i have now a box of qtips and a small bottle of isopropanol in front of me