Ronny Gabriels Photography

Sunday on the Zolder Circuit. Great races of the Belgian GT championship, the Benelux Racing League and the Belgian Historic Cup. Great photo opportunities. Me shooting away and then it happened. The most stupid thing that can happen when you’re a photographer. My batteries went dead. Now normally that’s not a problem, because I always carry spare batteries that I can put in the Battery grip I use for my Canon 400D. The thing is, I have never had to use the spares and no they weren’t dead either. I loaded the spare batteries in the special holder and put it in the battery grip. So far so good. I tried turning the camera on and nothing happened. I took the special holder out and put it back in again, still nothing. So I took it back out and took a close look. What I didn’t see the first time (or ever before) was that on the bottom side of the holder, there were slots for two more batteries. So the holder took 6 instead of 4.
There I was with only 4 batteries that might as well be dead too, because without the two extra ones, the camera wouldn’t turn on. After looking for batteries in all the shops around the circuit I had to come to the conclusion that my day of shooting the races was over. Stupid and embarrassing. So now I will not leave the house with a) fully charged camera batteries and b) ENOUGH spare batteries.

The moral of the story is of course, try out everything before you leave, even the spares. I will not forget this lesson easily, and I promise you that if it would ever happen to you, you won’t forget either.

So I took a lot less photos this Sunday than on other racing events. That doesn’t mean there were no good ones. They will be posted later this week, after I had a chance to have a look at them. So see you back here later on for the report of the races that I did get to shoot.

PS: the red in my cheeks is finally fading after two days ;-)