When you screw up at work, is it in isolated incidents that can be blamed on that idiot Tibor, or do you just throw a whole day in the trash? I make my share of mistakes, usually ones that I can cover up or fix before I look stupid. Not this time.

Despite the stress and responsibility, shooting weddings is easy if you have been doing it long enough. You bring the same gear, prepared the same way, to take the same pictures. How do you screw that up? Well …

Strike one: Camera batteries, charge ‘em. I have three batteries for my Mark II, or two and a half if you take into account the quality of the after market battery. Forgot to charge all three of them. The camera didn’t die on me, but I didn’t shoot as much as normal, and I had to carry a backup camera on me all day (on top of regular gear which gets heavy!)

Strike two: If you have gear that belongs to the office, bring it back. We wanted to use the portable softbox setup we rigged for Vegas. It was super windy and real lights would have been insane. So after I got the call from work reminding me to grab the gear, I promptly packed it all in a box neatly, and left it sitting in my home office. The day is looking good. . .

Strike three: If your going to wear contacts, bring extras. This is so obvious I that I always pack 3 or so extra pairs. I bought some new camera bags for Vegas, even put contacts it each bag, but lost them somewhere in the shuffle repacking gear for this job. The left contact came out first but I put it back in. When the right one came out (who knows? allergies?) I dropped it on a filthy carpet and stepped on it looking for it. Luckily my contact RX is the same in both eyes, so my left contact went to the right, and the half blurry vision gave me a hell of a headache. Didn’t miss a shot though, just couldn’t tell when some of them were in focus.

The closer: Woke up this morning with some evil kind of pulled muscle. In the wrong spot. It’s quite disconcerting to wake up to a pulled groin when you don’t remember pulling the thing. Did I have fun last night I don’t know about? Two hours in my back was aching from picking up the slack, and the right side of my right thigh went numb from the knee to the hip for most of the night. That was preferable to a sharp pang happening with every step. Not as preferable as sitting down . . .

Oh well, it’s not all bad. It was an 8 hour day. Some last 10, some last 12. Vegas was even more (over two days though). This was the last wedding for 5 weeks, so I have plenty of time to get my shit together. Time to put some more ice on, uhh, nevermind . . .

The advent of digital changed nearly every aspect of the photography workflow. Shooters and programmers tried to wrap their heads around the new technology while keeping the process as close to the old days as possible. Your computer wouldn’t ask you what to do with pictures when you plugged a card in, and it took some old-school pc skills to process, archive, and display images. Before the days of picasa, f-spot, iphoto and the like you had to mine the internet to find the little gems like Photo Mechanix and iView multimedia.
Photo Mechanix was a lightweight image viewer that had great batch renaming, but problems with the rest of the features. iView Pro was great from the start. Cataloging, sorting, editing and batch processing all in one. Of course iView tried to improve their product through two new versions. The first update to 2.5 pro was great, more undo’s, some better web gallery templates, etc. The upgrade to 3 was pure evil however. Plenty of crashes, bugs, and the complete lack of an undo function when deleting images from a catalog.

When iView decided to put out a progressively shittier product they piqued the interest of Microsoft. Microsoft made a bid for the company, which resulted in the company shutting down all development and customer support while they waited for their fat buy out checks. The product disappeared for three years, and now a bastardized version called Microsoft Expression Media is out. The trial version crashes, stops responding, and is general piece of shit. Like Vista SP1, the fun now sets you back $300. Like we needed anymore reasons to get behind Adobe’s Lightoom, but now we have another.

With no support for newer camera raw files, my old copy of iView is now retired. Between Bridge and Lightroom I have a new workflow that is actually better than the iView approach, but I still miss being able to dump files in a catolog, sort em, export and delete the catalog. With thousands of photographers on the market (and more of you who think you need pro tools) I can’t understand why something has not been released to replace iView. Aperture is usable, but slow and counter-intuitive. iPhoto is just plain horrible, forcing you to surrender control over your files. Picasa was never meant for more than organization of images and posting online, so like gThumb and f-spot there is just not enough power in the program (the price is right though).

So rest in peace iView, and may your ashes be cloned by some FOSS developer and released for debian linux.