Re: Film photographer trying to keep an open mind

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:18:17 -0700, William_F <bill@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>My wife and I have been advanced amateur photographers for many years,
>we even have our own darkroom at home. For years we've resisted the
>move to digital, at first because we weren't convinced of the quality
>and also because of my inherent fear of trusting everything I shoot to
>a hard drive or recordable CD (I can't tell you how many hard drives
>I've fried over the years or how many recordable CDs that have
>suddenly become unreadable).
>
>We finally took the leap recently, figuring it was about time, but
>recognizing we wouldn't get rid of any of our film equipment until we
>got the hang of digital. We purchased a Nikon Coolpix 5.1 MP with a 1
>GB SD memory card. Outside of testing it around the house and being
>satisfied with the results, our first serious outing with the camera
>was at a family wedding. We shot some 100 pictures that night,
>checking often to make sure the pictures were there and looked good.
>Two days later I went to move the pictures over to my desktop. When I
>plugged the camera into the computer I got an error message that
>suddenly made me sick to my stomach, "Memory card is not formatted,
>would you like to format it now?" When I tried to check the index
>feature using the camera I also got the message "card is not
>formatted." I'd practiced this procedure several times before the
>wedding and had no problem, so I knew the card was formatted and
>worked properly prior the wedding. I shut off the camera and put the
>SD card directly into my desktop and then my laptop (both have SD
>slots). Now I got the error message, "Card is damaged/Unreadable."
>Now I was in deep ***. This was my neice's wedding and I was going
>to catch holy hell for convincing my wife to trust pictures to a
>digital camera. A technician at our local compute repair store
>confirmed my worst fears when he examined the card in his reader and
>proclaimed, "It's unreadable, dude."
>
>The card has since been sent back to the manufacturer. They couldn't
>extract anything from it either and sent me a new one that so far is
>working good. For an old fashioned photog who was trying to give an
>honest chance to digital, I'm feeling quite burned. 100 wedding
>photos down the drain, faster than I can snap my fingers. I've got a
>very expensive trip coming up to Antarctica that I was hoping to use
>my digital camera on, and I'm sure that's what most people will be
>using. After this experience, however, I'm bringing all my film gear
>as well. ;-)

I think there is probably more to this story than you are relaying,
but I had my own darkroom as well and remember alot more accidents
involving film than I've ever had with digital. The fact is,
digital is FAR more "bullet proof" than film ever was.
-Rich
.