August Personal Roundup

August was a fun and yet not fun in a few ways month for me.

First up, I moved into my new studio! I left my 12×12 little room and I’m in a huge place now.

It’s glorious to have all that room and I can do so much more in it now!

The very next day, I turned 43 years old! I celebrated with half a slice of cake, hahahahahaha.

I went to teach at Pixel Photo Fest, which was both awesome and a disaster. The tech rep that was supposed to be there pulled his back and was unable to make it, so I did table duty for the show also.. except that I didn’t have a SIGMA shirt or a tablecloth or anything.. I looked like I was hawking stolen lenses for two days. So there were three of us representing SIGMA there. Me, Meg (center) and Michelle. Michelle’s disaster was a hotel room mistake and they were sold out for a concert. Everything in 30 miles was sold out. Meg even had to share a room with another person because things were out. Michelle waited in the lobby for four hours until 4am to get a room released to her. My weekend’s last class I had picked a family with 7 kids for my models and they were AMAZING. Kids were perfect, class was great, I was sure I’d avoided all the weekend disasters… until I went to go take those images off the cards to show my class about editing and such. Nope, disaster achieved: I had formatted the card. Now usually it simply reallocates the space to be used again and doesn’t delete the files, you can easily get them back with some recovery software. Canon and Nikon have no trouble with this. Unless you shoot on Sony.. they nuke the whole damn file system. It’s gone, as if I have never used the card at all. Sooo here I am sitting in class with 2 hours of shooting we’d just done… GONE. 8 people watching me try not to panic with an audience. I called the family back, reshoot in 20 minutes, speed edit and then do my sales appointment for the students. Wow, was that ever not great. Thank goodness everyone understood. They even thought I was ‘more human’. One of the students said “if not for the look of panic on your face, I would have suspected you’d orchestrated all that on purpose so we’d know how to handle it!” Uhhh no, that was real.