Dirty Lens

This is why I'm still a rank amateur.

I take my equipment for granted far too often. I assume that I can just pull a camera out of its case and start using it without doing simple checks.

Like, whether I have a data card in it or whether that card has enough storage space. I've gone out to do an entire photo shoot, only to discover, when I returned home, that the SD card wasn't in the camera. I've also had to cull photos that were already on the card so that I had room to shoot the photos that I had set out to take.

I've left the house with a camera that had a dead battery. The camera was essentially a paper weight. Fortunately, I haven't done that for any organized shoot with my photo club and I've had my smartphone as a backup.

But still...

And recently, I set out on a kayaking adventure with my 360-degree camera without doing a final lens cleaning before rolling. This blunder happened a couple of weeks ago, when DW and I had a friend join us on a beautiful late-October paddle of Calabogie Lake.

Of course, I could see the lens that faced me and knew that it was clean. But because I couldn't see the lens on the other side of the video camera, I didn't notice a greasy smudge on it, likely from a misplaced thumb as I was securing the camera to my kayak deck.

We paddled the afternoon away: me, capturing video throughout our trek. In the end, as I downloaded the video from the camera onto my phone and edited the files, I couldn't quite notice that some of the footage was blurry. It wasn't until I imported the files onto my computer and added them to my video-editing software that I could see I had a problem.

I had imported just over 19 minutes of video, but most of it was unusable.

I still wanted to create a video of our afternoon, so I whittled down my footage until I had just over three-and-a-half minutes of video, and even some of that was blurry. I didn't want to just include footage with me in the frame.

A week ago, I posted the finished video on my YouTube channel. Here it is:

Note to self: do a final wipe of your lenses once the camera is firmly mounted in place.

Happy Tuesday!