[spectrrr]

Wow... that was an interesting wedding, sprinkled with some near terror. Murphy was working overtime on this one!

absolutely fuking terrifying when 10 minutes before the ceremony I click the shutter, here a rattle inside the camera, and get a black picture..... pop the lens off and discover that the focal plane mirror that splits light between the viewfinder and the metering/focal sensors has completely come unglued, is rattling loose, and cracked.

Now let me take a second to remind you, I don't have my full kit with me. I don't even have a 1/4 of the kit with me. That's my only camera and lens, and I am up in the mountains, literally hours away from civilization.

Thanks to the grace of God, I had had, on a whim, thrown a tube of super glue in my backpack that morning..... and the ceremony was running a few minutes late. I glued the mirror back together (fortunately it wasn't cracked on the part that went to the focusing sensor!) and then glued it back into the camera. Right side of my viewfinder was realllllllly blury, but other than that I was back in business!!!!

Option 2 if that didn't work would have been to shoot it completely blind, on manual exposure. AF still worked fine, but without the darker mirror there, metering got thrown out of whack by about +3 stops too bright.

Interesting for sure because it was a Venezuelan wedding - similar to ours, but lots of distinct differences in terms of how things are organized and run. Rehearsal? more like a circus show. "let it happen" was the unspoken motto for the day. Cool thing was, it did all happen... and the heart that I saw there was some of the most I've ever seen in a wedding, very touching to see how everyone worked it.

flat out strange when dinner was served at, no joke, 12:45am .... these guys really like to party late!!!! Oh yeah, and I won't even talk about the "hora loca" later on... which was kind of like a mini mardis gras, and music that changed every 30 seconds until everyone was too damned tired to move anymore.