The Great Rain Tragedy

I used to have a Fuji 6x9 Rangefinder. It's a medium format camera. Solid. Wide Angle. Really sharp. I only had it for a little while because I sold it to buy my 70-180 macro. I don't regret that in the least because I love my macro lens. However, that camera is at the center of the Great Rain Tragedy. One of the few times that photography made my heart ache. Made me cry, no sob, really. And I had no one to blame but myself. And the weather gods. And my photography professor. Ok, it was really just me. Sigh.

Let's go back a few years...I was taking night classes at Cal Poly Pomona and one of the classes was Photography. We had to take our assignments every week to be "critiqued" by the professor and fellow students. We shot slides, of course, so we could view them together. I carried my slides, ALL my favorites, in a portfolio box. One night, it was pouring rain. Buckets. Oceans of rain. I was driving a car back then (gasp!) and I made my way thru the rivers to school. I grabbed my portfolio box and ran to class. Only the professor wasn't there. He'd cancelled. Argh. So I ran back thru the rain and made my way back thru the rivers, sans oars, to my nice dry home. I was soaked to the skin. My first priority was to get dry and get warm. After a while, I grabbed my school stuff to put it away. When I picked up my portfolio box, a few drops of water fell onto the floor. No, no, no. Please, no. I crossed my fingers and opened the box...

Aaahhhhhhh! Yes, you guessed it...WATER. IN MY BOX. A few pages deep. Covering the pages that held my medium format slides. I frantically pulled out the slides and dried them off. But it was too late. They were warped. Stained. RUINED!!! Some of the 6x6s from my Yashica. And all but one of the 6x9s from the Fuji. Or so I thought. I still had the 6x6 so there was the possiblity of taking those shots again, especially the ones from Joshua Tree. Oh, they wouldn't be the same but who knows, I might like them better. But the 6x9s from the Fuji...since that camera was gone so were any hopes of redoing those. All I have left of that camera is this one slide.

And then when I was copying it the other day, I saw that it has some damage too. A tiny bit of warping in the sky. You can see it if you click on the photo...towards the center. So really I have no slides left from the Fuji.

Well, I do also have this one tiny scan of another shot that a friend put on his website. That's it. Nada mas.

Both are of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forsest in the White Mountains. That was quite a trek. I drove 10 miles over a dirt road to get to Patriarchs Bowl. The view up there was amazing. I felt like I was on top of the world. It was so beautiful. And weird. Those trees are thousands of years old. Talk about feeling small and insignificant in the world! And then I realized why I was the only one up there when I heard thunder rolling my way and there was no where to hide. So I hightailed it back to my car and started driving back in the rain. And that dirt road turned into mud. It took forever and I thought a couple of times that I was stuck (I was in a Rav4) but I prayed and I made it out and safely back down the mountain. That, my friends, was a close one.

So I'm sure you can guess what losing those slides meant to me. After all the adventure and the beauty that I had seen up there, it made me cry to see them shriveled up and scattered on the table. I think that's why I now embrace digital. I not only have copies of my photos on my laptop, but on cd, and on an external drive. And some of them are stored on a website. That's NOT going to happen to me again!