In yet another thing in a long series of mundanity that only matters to me, I managed to fix the busted DSLR tonight (perfect timing for my little trip to NYC* tomorrow). I was playing with the body with the lens off tonight, and could see that one of the bits of the shutter was sticking about 3/4 of the way down (which made perfect sense given how odd looking the exposures have been. I set the camera to a 30″ exposure, reached in and gently flicked the edge and it popped right up. Took a bunch of test shots, all seems to be well. The downside of which being it weakens my already underpowered case for a Canon 5D Mark II*.

In other photo-wise news, I’m looking forward to seeing CNHB’s shots from her gig at the SRI Charter Member’s meeting tonight (in conjunction with the GreenBuild Conference). I notice the GreenBuild guys are having a 5K race tomorrow to conclude their program – don’t they realize any optional burning of calories for fun, sport or celebration of life is not environmentally sound? My reductio ad absurdum-dar says let’s do the math showing that exercise by it’s very nature is not and cannot be a green activity. There’s a lotta fuel going into making those calories you’re burning up there racers. At least they’ve wisely opted not to loop over the Longfellow as any sudden motion or stiff breeze may well cause that to collapse into the Charles*.

(*not green)

My friggin camera is broken. This is emblematic of how the whole day has gone. Were I not a generally pessimistic and irritable person I could pretend the encroaching shadow across the frame was making some sort of insightful point about the early onset darkness that marks the end of daylight savings time. Instead I’m just kinda bummed about the whole of it all, resigned to sitting here enjoying my Vitamin D deficiency. Woo hypocalcemic tetany!

All in all, I took somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 photographs yesterday at my first wedding still photography shoot. I had thought there were more, but scanning through them, I think we’re in pretty good shape. Adding in BML’s, we’re looking at 12.5 GB of RAW source material. I’m going to have to formalize a workflow for processing these. I think I’m going to switch from Picasa to Adobe Bridge for this project and others of similar volume. Since these photographs are in RAW, each one will be white balanced, cropped and converted to jpg before dissemination. Also, I think I’m going to end up getting a Noise Ninja license to de-noise some of these ISO 800 interior non-flash shots.

Anyway, it was a long day. I was up for 22 hours straight and my right wrist is hurting from lugging around a Canon Zoom Telephoto EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS. A fantastic telephoto lens, but heavy heavy heavy, and not a good lens to have on when you find yourself quickly shooting something in a tight space.

The identifiable good point of the day waited to present itself til 11:52pm when taking the dog outside. There was a late arriving Fedex package that had not been there previously with a charger and new battery for the new SLR. At risk of sounding like a commercial, I friggin love these guys at Sterling Tek. CNSMHB bought 20 TX1 batteries from them for like $120 before their Africa trip (only 8 of which survived elephant-poop free), and now I’ve got this new BP511 for half the cost of the original from B&H. So it looks like I’ll finally get to test this thing out tomorrow & this weekend.

I still need a lens for it, and some other batteries and a charger. But the body was free to me, and it’s beautiful.