We’re having the house painted this week, and so I had this idea of doing a time-lapse sequence of the work being done on the house. I set up my 1D Mark II on a tripod by the pool, hooked up the DC coupler and the timer remote controller. Shooting at an interval of 5 seconds per photo, I figured I’d have a great sequence to share.

Hours after I set it up, I returned to see that the camera was shut down, even though the DC coupler was still firmly in place. Power cycling the camera with a battery, I realized with horror that my shutter had failed! Here are some photos of the sad, non-operational camera now. I guess it’s time to turn it into Canon for possible repair, no?

This is why you have backups… for your data and for your computer and photography equipment. You never know when something is going to break on you!

I was at the iPhone 3.0 event today at Apple’s Town Hall this morning, covering the event with John Paczkowski for AllThingsD.com. I ran into a number of people that I know from both development and media circles, including Raven Zachary and Eric Savitz. The crowd was comprised of about 60% developers and 40% media.

When I shot the MacWorld Keynote this year for All Things Digital, I was missing a critical piece from my computer and photography kit, a BixNet battery to power my Cradlepoint EVDO/Wi-Fi router. Without the battery, I had to manually transfer images from the camera to the computer to SmugMug. At the time, I was pretty efficient, but I wish I could have removed those extra download and upload steps.

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We had a great meeting at the March 2009 COBA meeting, held at new location at SmugMug headquarters. I gave a presentation on my mobile photography workflow, demonstrating how I use a Cradlepoint CTR-350, EVDO modem, and a Eye-Fi wireless card to immediately send my photos to my laptop and computer.

Using this setup is a great way to document an event like COBA. In the past, if I did not transfer, annotate, and upload the photos the night of the meeting, chances are, they would never get uploaded to SmugMug. Now, all I have to do after the meeting is right a quick post and caption the photos!

Following my presentation, J.C. Dill and Landon gave a good talk on their sensor cleaning saga. They’ve used many products, but have now settled on using products from Dust-Aid. I had an opportunity to clean my 1Ds Mark II sensor; there were several spots that were removed after using Dust-Aid. A few ones lingered, but they are on the edges and I don’t mind them as much.

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