Today I attended a “Jazz Breakfast” fundraiser on the roof of a vacant building in Melville, to raise money for an upcoming poetry festival at the Melville Visitors Centre. The weather was splendid, the view was sensational, the conversation was pleasant, and the music was lovely. It was a perfectly enjoyable — and blog-able — morning. I had a blast taking photos.
View of the Joburg skyline from the roof of the old Nike shop on 4th Avenue in Melville. Tables ready and waiting for jazz breakfast revelers.
Unfortunately, due to a grave operator error, all but a handful of the frames I shot were lost. In other words, I was a total idiot and erased them. Words cannot convey the depth of my despair and self-loathing. Joe tried to console me by saying he’s made the same mistake, more than once. I still hate myself, especially because I wanted to write a nice post about the day for my friends at the Melville Visitors Centre.
I managed to salvage four decent pics, all of which were taken in the first ten minutes of the breakfast (before anyone else had arrived).
Another take on the beautiful view. Later on, I took several nice shots of people actually sitting at the tables, talking and laughing, drinking colorful glasses of fruit juice and feasting on eggs and bacon. I destroyed those images by prematurely pressing the “format card” button on the back of my camera.Â
Our morning entertainment: The Hannah Wildflower Trio. They were fabulous. I took many photos of people listening to the music while raising steaming cups of coffee to their lips. I also took more, and far better, photos of the performers themselves. But they’re gone. All gone.
In a vain attempt to make myself feel better, I decided to dress up this picture by making it black-and-white.
I like to think that my erased photos are in photo heaven now, looking down at me hunched over my laptop and laughing their asses off.
RIP, Jazz Breakfast Photos.
RIP awesome photos. At least you had the experience, and no one can take that away. I can almost picture myself sitting there in the Jozi chill with a delicious cup of coffee. Bliss.
You’ll be doing just that soon enough!
Oh man I have done this as well and you just can’t stop kicking yourself. I’ve also had my camera screen completely grey out for my entire first trip to Ethiopia. I forgot to change the white balance for the first day back from florescent and ended up some with ridiculously bad photos.
Ha! It’s not funny, but it is. Joe pointed out that I was lucky this happened on a day like today, rather than after my Kruger trip or something like that. I guess I won’t complain.
Wait till that sort of shit happens on your mother-in-laws 90th birthday party and you’re the ONLY photographer there, which happened to me last year
Oh NOOOO.
Don’t you just want to kick yourself when you do something like that! Bless your heart! But I love the notion of the shots being in heaven laughing their photographic asses off! Hope you had a great weekend otherwise!
Kathy
Thanks Kathy. I did have a nice weekend and will be blogging about more of it soon!
Just wait, you’ll hear more horror stories of people’s lost images! Won’t bring yours back but may ease the pain a little:-) Anyway, maybe there was an undercover agent at the breakfast who didn’t want to get framed……
Ha! Maybe you’re right. I’ve gotten some good stories already and they do make me feel a little better 🙂
Photo heaven – LOL…maybe they will resurrect in another form….an even greater one at the poetry festival!
Love the black and white photo!
Thanks Rhoda 🙂 Hope you’re well.
Love the photos that you did save. We rarely see clouds like that down at the coast.
Thanks. Those clouds didn’t hang around long, actually — they were gone within about 15 minutes of when I took the pictures. So I’m glad I was at least able to salvage those.
Your camera actually has a button that formats the card without asking for confirmation? Toss it.
Ha! No, it asked me for confirmation and I confirmed. I thought I’d already copied over all the pics to my computer. Then after the formatting, I looked at the folder on my computer and it only had the first 40 pics in it.