As photojournalists, we rely on a lot of technology to work. If one piece of equipment fails, we either find a work around or the photo doesn’t happen.

For example, I was shooting a soccer match when all of the sudden I had a large and odd-shaped highlight across my images. My shutter failed.

When a DSLR shutter begins to fail, it may produce images that look like this.

It was one part of a piece of technology that I rely on to work. It failed me. Luckily, I was able to get a backup camera and finish my assignment.

On Thanksgiving day, I was photographing the Turkey Day football game between Webster Groves and Kirkwood high schools. My plan was to shoot a time lapse of the entire game. For this, I knew I was going to be relying on a ton of technology to work perfectly. Just as a broken shutter causes camera failure, if one link in my mighty time lapse chain were to fail, the project would be a bust.

When I have a project with a “grand plan” like this one, I stay up excessively late the night before, packing and repacking. I can’t forget anything. Every battery has to be new. Every lens has to be spotless. Every cable has to be packed.

The morning of the game, I went to the field three hours early. I climbed on top of the press box and began mounting my camera and running my power cord. Any dial that could be turned or button that could be pressed was taped down. I hooked up a PocketWizard MultiMax and used its intervalometer setting to trigger one frame every 20 seconds starting at 10am.

The camera inside of the red circle above the word "STATE" is my time lapse camera.

That was the last I saw of my camera for five hours or so.

After the game, I ran up to the press box and started packing my gear without knowing if everything went according to plan. As soon as I got back to the newsroom, I checked the files on the computer as was happy to see that the camera fired off 917 photos. That’s just over five hours of continuous shooting. EVERYTHING WORKED!

I edited the time lapse to include audio and action shots for a multimedia piece on the web. I also made a version that was just the uninterrupted time lapse.

Turkey Day time lapse

As long as you check and recheck, you can avoid technology and equipment failure most of the time. Be prepared for it to happen and you will never be stuck in a hard place.