Friday, November 18, 2011

Day 703

There's nothing remotely glamorous about pet photography. Big dogs knock over your strobe lights. Little dogs pee on Santa's lap. Pet owners almost universally think their dogs are better behaved than they actually are. Spend the day photographing dogs and I'll guarantee that you'll come home thinking that mowing the grass or cleaning the house is a piece of cake.

Today we embarked on the first in our annual holiday marathon of Santa Paws photo events. Santa is tired. I'm tired. All the volunteers are tired. We got some good photos though, and all our customers seemed happy. You'd think these events would get easier, since we've done so many. Unfortunately, they seem to get harder every year. We're all a year older. The equipment seems heavier and the dogs seem more unruly.

Luckily, I didn't have to take the set down tonight, since we're going back to the same location tomorrow. Nothing got broken today, but I did lose one of my SD memory cards. These expensive little cards are super easy to lose, because they're about the size of a postage stamp. It's amazing that you can store 32 GB of information on something the size of a stamp. I still remember when 5 GB hard drives were larger than a shoe box. These huge old drives were impossible to lose though. I've still got a few collecting dust in the storage warehouse.

On the way home this evening, the door latch broke on my Defender 90 and the front door sprang open while I was driving down a major freeway during rush hour. I had to continue driving another 35 miles holding the door shut with one hand while I tried to steer with the other. This isn't easy to do in a manual transmission car. Whenever I needed to change gears, I had to either let the door flap open again, or turn loose of the steering wheel for a moment. Mostly, I let go of the steering wheel, because I didn't want another car on the busy highway to rip my door off as it was passing me on the left. When I got home, I finally managed to get the door to shut again, but I don't trust it now. I'll probably just leave it locked and get in on the passenger side when I return for another day of pet photography tomorrow. Unfortunately, I won't have time to go to the Land Rover dealer until Monday.

This has really been a long day. I don't think I'll have any problems getting to sleep tonight.

Puppies are our Dalmatians of the Day

Watch of the Day