shit happens
it's bad enough having to get up at 5am to catch to indonesia, but it's worse, five hours and two shitty plane rides later, to get to the first stop of your overseas assignment and find out that your camera (the ONLY slr body you brought since you thought it was indestructible) has a busted shutter.
how the hell does this happen?
at this point, your heart does 15 backflips and lodges itself some place in your throat that restricts normal breathing, and you start having to force your heartbeat down from a zillion beats per minute to something more reasonable that would aid in lucid thinking.
breathe. think. act.
act, in this case, entails taking out the s80 point and shoot that i almost didn't bring, and whipping out the phone to call maye-e who was in thailand at the time for the number of the AP office in jakarta in the faint hopes that they would have a spare body that i could borrow for the rest of my trip in indonesia.
then something else starts irritating me, this time my feet, and i wonder why i can actually feel the gravel through the shoe soles. too busy to worry about that, i file that thought away for later consideration. to cut a long story short, i'd forgotten to buy a pair of shoes to go with my suit, and dug out an old but hardly used pair of black timberlands to use. for those of you who don't realize this, if you buy shoes and don't use them for an extended period of time, they get pissy with you and often go to pieces just to spite you.
which is exactly what my pair did to me.
note the absence of shoe soles. that's right, the whole rubber sole disintegrated and vanished leaving the innards of the shoes in the public domain. embarrassing, especially since the next day involved covering a courtesy call on the indonesian foreign minister and the vice-president with no time to get a new pair.
in the end, things worked themselves out, i borrowed a spare camera body from ap (ironically, none of the pictures i shot with the "real camera" were used) and the trusty s80 managed to save my hide by giving me this page one picture.
all the same, i'm going to save myself future grief and make sure i have a spare camera body and regularly used shoes in the future, which i guess, is the object lesson of this trip.
how the hell does this happen?
at this point, your heart does 15 backflips and lodges itself some place in your throat that restricts normal breathing, and you start having to force your heartbeat down from a zillion beats per minute to something more reasonable that would aid in lucid thinking.
breathe. think. act.
act, in this case, entails taking out the s80 point and shoot that i almost didn't bring, and whipping out the phone to call maye-e who was in thailand at the time for the number of the AP office in jakarta in the faint hopes that they would have a spare body that i could borrow for the rest of my trip in indonesia.
then something else starts irritating me, this time my feet, and i wonder why i can actually feel the gravel through the shoe soles. too busy to worry about that, i file that thought away for later consideration. to cut a long story short, i'd forgotten to buy a pair of shoes to go with my suit, and dug out an old but hardly used pair of black timberlands to use. for those of you who don't realize this, if you buy shoes and don't use them for an extended period of time, they get pissy with you and often go to pieces just to spite you.
which is exactly what my pair did to me.
note the absence of shoe soles. that's right, the whole rubber sole disintegrated and vanished leaving the innards of the shoes in the public domain. embarrassing, especially since the next day involved covering a courtesy call on the indonesian foreign minister and the vice-president with no time to get a new pair.
in the end, things worked themselves out, i borrowed a spare camera body from ap (ironically, none of the pictures i shot with the "real camera" were used) and the trusty s80 managed to save my hide by giving me this page one picture.
all the same, i'm going to save myself future grief and make sure i have a spare camera body and regularly used shoes in the future, which i guess, is the object lesson of this trip.
posted by beeker at 1:01 AM
2 Comments:
woah. never seen a busted shutter before. scary man. glad things worked out in the end.
wes
Gosh, the last time my camera died on me without a spare body I panicked big time too. And I was only in Singapore! Imagine that happening overseas! Great to know it worked out in the end.
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