last Egypt post - from layover in Zurich

had a vey nasty fright with my gear yesterday after Saqqara + Fishawy + walks in Islamic Cairo.

took the SD card out of my Fuji X100s, stuck it into my SD card reader plugged into my Mac and waited for it to do its thing, as it had diligently done the previous day, loading its contents/photos onto my computer.

a good 80% of the 120 or so pics I'd taken showed up on my screen not as the customary thumb-nails, but blank with a little question-mark on them - or exceedingly blurred. Needless to say, they wouldn't properly open. SD card goes back in my Fuji, same result.

damn.

Natural assumption was that the files had somehow been corrupted by the SD card reader - though things had gone without a hitch only the previous day.

Even so, I plopped the card back into the reader and ran my photo recovery app.

Took bloody ages and fished out photos from long ago, including absolutely all my India pics - but in the end I was able to recover all of that day's Cairo photos too.

Intensely frustrating when you figure you've had a great day's photography and that "it's in the box". That feeling that whatever you do, at the end of the day you depend upon tiny, unknown and sometimes temperamental pieces of electronic and/or software functioning properly.

confirmed my resolve, since a few weeks ago already, to move back - not exclusively of course, I'm no ayatollah - to film photography.

Dependable, marvelously simple, great rendering (a matter of taste of course, but Tri-X, for instance, has so much character) - and, to my mind at least, sexier equipment I just enjoy more using.

D600 and D3300 give fantastic results, but there's no particular pleasure in handling them. Df, X-T1 and X100s are sexier. But really nothing beats the feeling of handling solidly-built little masterpieces of mechanical engineering such as F2AS, F3, FM2, FM3a or Leica M6.

That and the fact that using these, with their inherent limitations in terms of speed, makes for a slower-paced, more reflective, thoughtful photographic experience, certain to be reflected in the results.

Speaking of which, I have about 7 rolls of film (from the past month or so) at home that I need to have processed...