God Teaches Us Humility - At All Times!

At this past weekend's Steubenville conference (the first of two for 2010—I'll also be present at next week's conference!), I took over 1,000 photos. After editing and deleting redundant or crummy pictures, I posted 353 of them to this Flickr collection (slideshow here).

My normal photo-taking workflow is this:

1. Take a ton of pictures (maybe 100-200).
2. Pop out memory card, insert into computer, transfer photos, erase memory card.
3. Take another ton of pictures.

Sadly, during Saturday night Eucharistic Adoration, I was happily snapping away a bunch of beautiful shots (I was probably up to about 100), and a little warning popped up on the camera "There was an error writing this image to the card. Please use a new card."

Well, this has happened before, and wasn't a problem, so I simply popped out the card, and re-inserted it, then took more pictures (I think the card overheated, or maybe some other odd bug happened). Well, after going back to the computer, I realized that all the first 100 or so pictures I had taken were gone.

A few minutes earlier, I was thinking to myself, "Man, these are some of the best photos I've shot at a Steubenville conference ever!

God was thinking, "This is a great opportunity for you to learn some humility, Jeff!"

I was angry when I returned to the computer and found that most of the pictures from adoration were gone, and I was unable to recover them with my PhotoRescue utility, but after praying over the situation, I realized that I should be thankful to God that I am able to take any pictures at all, and I should always realize that my photographs are only meant to give HIM the glory. Not me.

It helps, though, that I didn't lose all the photos. There were still some beautiful shots of our Lord in the monstrance, like this one: