Unfortuante and Unintended Consequences of an Interest in Photography

Today, for the second time, I drove up to the top of a mountain in Gatlinburg to watch people sift through a burnt-out house. It was cold, but not bitterly so; foggy, but not so bad that I couldn’t drive; and cold, although amazingly not intolerably. I remember thinking in California that 40 degrees was very cold weather. Today, I was perfectly OK in 40 degree weather with only my raincoat.

I brought my camera but didn’t have a chance to take pictures. They wouldn’t have looked like much anyway. The fall colors so far are pretty bland — the summer stayed warm so long, and the weather turned cold so suddenly, that most of the trees are just turning brown instead of the dazzling display of yellow, orange, and red that I saw last year at this time. And there was quite a bit of fog. And, my camera is really more for snapshots than serious photographs; if I wanted to take a picture that would capture the power of the mountains, I would need a wide-angle lens, and a 10mm apeture with no lens mounts just isn’t going to do that. Oh, well.

But as it turned out, I had a use for my camera anyway. When I got to the office today, Happy Bachelor Lawyer had a client in who had just been the victim of a home invasion robbery. He had been stabbed in his hand and under his arm in the attack, and took a few punches in the face by his assailant. So I took some pictures of the guy — gory, nasty stuff. The dude had to take off his shirt so I could get photos of the scar on his upper chest, and it was quite clear the guy hadn’t showered in at least a day. I’m talking powerful B.O. here, folks. I got through it, but Bad Attitude Paralegal almost audibly retched. The office stank of it for about half an hour afterwards. I downloaded the pictures to the network at the office, and deleted the awful things off my camera immediately.

So I learned my lesson. I’m leaving my camera at home from now on.