Red Hot Pictures

Well, I exaggerate slightly. But too hot to hold.

As I’ve written before, I still stick to a rather relaxed regime for filing work, preferring to have had a good look at my images on a large colour-corrected screen and making any necessary adjustments – burning, dodging and occasionally even a slight crop – before sending them out into the world.

So last night as usual, I got home, powered up the computer, put the CF card into the reader, added a few keywords to the Lightroom input dialogue, clicked on import and then went downstairs to pour out a glass of a rather decent southern French red and start on dinner. Fortunately before I picked up my knife and fork, I remembered something else I needed to do and went back upstairs, to be greeted by the acrid smell of bien cuit bakelite and an error message on the screen telling me that a USB device was malfunctioning. A small wisp of smoke confirmed this.

I picked up the card reader and immediately dropped it again – it really was too hot to hold – then pulled out the plug and holding the reader by its cooler edges, away from any components, held the card also by its cooler edge and pulled it out.

I’m not sure what temperature a CF card has to reach for meltdown, but I was certainly very worried at that point that I had fried my pictures.  Fortunately I had a spare card reader handy and was able to plug that in.  A couple of minutes later I sighed with relief as the drive opened on screen and I saw a complete list of files, and even more relief when images appeared in Lightroom’s import.  This time I watched to make sure the import started properly before going down for dinner.

© 2011, Peter Marshall

One or two of the pictures weren’t bad, and together with the story NHS 63rd Birthday March in London they were on Demotix before I went to bed just a little after midnight. But I’ll probably write more about them in a week or two after I’ve put them and some more on My London Diary.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Celebrating the 63rd Birthday of the NHS at the Houses of Parliament

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