Photographers, What Are Your Horror Stories?
 

No, I'm not asking for stories about flakey or crazy models or their asshole boyfriends. I mean stories about problems with locations, equipment, and other technical aspects of shooting. Here's my initial contribution:

I checked into a nice hotel to do a double shoot yesterday, and to my horror, I discovered that almost the entire wall behind the bed was mirror. Now, I'm doing pro-am work, which is quite a bit less formal than Playboy or even Hustler style, but even so, I do try to keep me and my equipment out of the photos. I largely succeeded, but it was very trying. I'm not sure if the guy in front of his computer cares if there's the reflection of an umbrella reflector in the photo as long as the girl is hot and the pose is stimulating, but even so, it was a bear of a shoot.

What are your stories?

Ugh, I would have put a nice sheet or something up over it.. what else can you do? Actually I think the worst was when I first got my G1, it had a TERRIBLE problem with battery drain. I don't know what it was, maybe the weather, but I couldnt' do more than 20 shots before the battery was dead. It dragged out my entire shoot by like an hour beacause I had to keep stopping and charging the camera again. What a pain in the ass, and I had to pay the model! What a pisser that was.

I have two, the first one I shot three galleries of a model paid her and then erased the card. lol Thankfully she was nice enough to come back and reshoot it all for nothing:) We bought her dinner. Second one was a location shoot these people we knew had a four post bed and offered to let us use there bedroom to shoot. Well their central air was screwing up and leaking water everywhere. They had a shag carpet that was soaked, so I had to set up my flashes and hang all the electrical cords high. I was very nervous standing in water connected to all those electric devices.

Had that same problem once too many times, and now I drag and AC adaptor to all my shoots (and an extension cord)

Ugh! It's nice to know there's a few models that will help out.. I had one or two like that too. :) But the last bit.. ugh!

Yeah I took mine, but I was outside out of range of extension cords.. *screams*

Now this one is embarassing as hell but here goes anyways:

I was 8 days into Spring Break down in Key West and before the scheduled contest at 11:30 PM I would shoot for a few hours in the club we had contracted. Shot about 2 hours and got several dozen awesome babes to flash me their pussy and tits as well as tounge each other etc...Good Shit!. I was on a roll! Well before the contest I went to review some of my shots on the camera and I then realized that I had left my microdrive back at the hotel. I had been taking pictures that whole time with no media in the CF slot! FUCK FUCK FUCK!

Well, at least my D100 won't work without media in it. I know a photographer who shot a whole "roll" with an empty camera. How embarrassing. And he was no rank beginner. Sometimes, experience breeds overconfidence, like the expert skydiver who jumped out of a plane one day having forgotten to put his chute on. (He had probably just finished his pep talk.)

I guess canon flubbed up on that feature on the D-30 :(

Luckily I had some 128 meg cards in my pocket otherwise I would have had to ride all the way back to the hotel and probably would have missed the main event.

Yah I heard about that parachute accident. I know I felt stupid but I could imagine how bad that guy felt! :(

Actually, it's "six of one, a half dozen of the other," because there are situations when I would like to be able to operate the camera without media. Suppose I have a partial card in the camera when I move on to the next series requiring different lighting. I want to do some readings, take a few test shots while the models are changing. Usually, I leave that card in the camera and take the shots and then hand-delete them, which is a pain (albeit, a minor one). I can think of other solutions (using a "scratch" card for those shots, for example), but usually I just shoot and delete. It'd be really nice if I could just take the CF card out for the test shots and then put it back in. But, like I said, no biggie.

Tripped and dropped a D100 down 2 sets of stairs... that was an expensive fuck up :(

That is my only horror story so far...

When I lived in LA, we had our own photo studio to shoot models for our magazine ads and stuff. One day I show up after hours and there is this mob looking guy in our lobby. He didn't know I owned the place and I walk in and he holds his arm out to block me and says, yo we're filming right now and nobodys allowed on the set.

I was like Exxxxxxcuuuuuuse Me, say that one more time. He gives me a fucked up tough guy look and still holding his arm out, says the same bs. I said to him "do you know who the fuck you're talking to dipshit, this is my fucking studio!" And he has the audacity to say I don't care who the fuck you are pal we're filming a movie right now and there's no admittance.

At this point, I thought OK this guy is an obvious dumb ass so I just grabbed his arm and pushed him into the wall and went back into my studio.

And to my surprise my photographer is back there filming a fucking porn movie in our studio. And right when I walk in this one dude is jerking his load in a closeup shot and his fricking cum is flying all over one of our sofas.

I lost it at that point and grabbed my photographer and said he had 5 minutes to get all this whole production out of my studio, which they then did.

Turned out my protographer was making some bucks on the side filming some scenes from porn movies after hours in there without us knowing about.

He ended up moving to Vegas after that, when I demanded a cut of all the money he made and he kept stalling on the payment.

:1orglaugh