Murphy's Law and Canon's 40D

This is my first post here, although I've been reading the forum for quite sometime.

I am a musician. I have my undergrad in Classical Guitar Performance. My income comes from teaching and playing at weddings/restaurants/p​rivate parties, etc. I've been doing photography as a hobby for about 4 years. I decided to try to make some money doing it. So far I've done shoots for billboards, business cards, and other banner advertisements.

This weekend I played with a jazz trio at a wedding. The couple were extremely nice, I offered to do photography work at the party for no charge, I just wanted to have a wedding in my portfolio. It was easy to step away from the trio, the bass and sax could easily continue without a guitar.

As the newly weds are getting out of the Rolls-Royce escort vehicle, I prepare for the shot. As they join together, I fire 3 shots and on the fourth I get ERR 99. I tried multiple memory cards, different batteries, removing all batteries, cleaned contacts, NOTHING worked!

I leave to San Francisco tomorrow morning at 6:35am for vacation. I sold my back up camera (my original DSLR, the Canon Rebel XT) a few weeks ago to help with new purchases like the, Canon 100-400m L, Canon 580ex flash and a Domke F804 bag + inserts and shoulder strap. I have a ton of locations that I want to visit and do some heavy photographing this week in cali...

So now im biting my nails, hoping that when Best Buy opens they will let me walk in and swap it out ( i bought the 4 year service plan) or if they are going to tell me the b/s that they want to send it in to their tech support.

oh yeah... when we moved the group into the dinning area, non of the plugs on the walls would work! I scoped out the area 2 weeks prior to the wedding to see if I needed extension chords. Luckly I had one in my car from the gig a week before! thats Murphy's Law...

Welcome to POTN Murphy, er… I mean, markbueno!
I am quite positive that Best Buy will let you exchange the camera right away..

Welcome to the forum. I too ahd Err99 when I first got the 40D. I upgraded the firmware and havn't seen it since.
You should've taken a duck picture first.

if best buy does not let you exchange a new product for you. give it to them for repair. go and buy a new one with 3 months no interest financing, then return it on the 14th day after using it. tell them you are going to do so because you need the camera, they may just exchange a new one for you. they will just send your old one in for repair and then sell it as an open box, so they don't really loose alot if they exchange one for you.

The problem was not Murphy's Law and your camera.

The problem was Murphy's Law and weddings.

Something always goes wrong at weddings. That's why wedding photographers have backup equipment and the wise ones have backups for their backups.

I don't shoot many weddings, but I think at every one I've had something go wrong. At the last one, an assistant dropped a battery magazine breaking it. Fortunately, I had a spare.

At a reception, someone stepped or fell on one of my camera bags, breaking a couple things.

I had a shutter go out on a camera at a wedding. I had a flash simply stop working once, too.

Your camera will probably work perfectly from now on, unless you get too close to a wedding.

Seriously, do you have a vertical grip on the camera? Sometimes I'll get an ERR99 with my cameras if it gets even slightly loose. The earlier version of the BG-E2 was more prone to this, I think.

Well, the first mistake was dumping a second body when planning to make $$ off of your shots. Especially for a wedding, even if free portfolio shots. You're reputation will tank when the one body fails and the B/G have no pics.

My 40D threw a bunch of E99s when I was in China, and again the first time I mounted my new 400 5.6. My 20D gets more use than the 40D. I'm sure the day after the warranty ends, it will finally self destruct. For now, I'll live with intermittent E99s since I have no way to reproduce the issue - and I have read that people have sent 40Ds back with Canon unable to reproduce the issue as well.

Extended warranty at Best Buy, yes they will let you exchange for a new one.