the stuff stories are made of.

hello, from turkey!  we're back in our hotel room after day number five of activities, and i just had to share the story of stories that i need to take this minute to unload.  

we've been here for five days.  that's five days worth of photos, five days worth of memories, five days worth of stories or 1.96 gigs of photos, to be exact.  as we walked up to the main dome in hagia sophia and after trying to snap a series of shots to later pin together for a panorama, my camera proceeded to tell me my memory card was full.  no big deal, right?  i sat down, tried to delete what pictures i could, then came up with the grand idea of taking my pictures in a lower res format so as to save disk space.  i went through my settings, found a setting called 'format', then checked the box that said 'lower quality' and hit 'okay'.  with NO warning, a progress bar started to fill and it was at that point that i realized what might be happening; i hit cancel mid-bar, but by then it was already too late.  that's right folks, FIVE DAYS worth of photos, 1.96 GIGS of photos, completely GONE.  ALL GONE.  i looked up from my camera at chris and very nearly started to cry, right there in hagia sophia.  what pains me the most is not the tourist shots that i can probably find a million of from a quick search on flickr, but i had some really great candid portraits of locals, the street "pets" and food snapshots - most of which i can't ever replicate since they were all of-the-moment shots.  my favorites were one of a kid playing with a street cat, two guys standing beside a street cat, one on each side, appearing as though they were all waiting for their lady companions, and a great portrait i snuck today just hours earlier of a local senior sitting across from us when we were on the ferry - all those photos, gone...in a poof.  with no 'are you sure?' warning from my camera, no 'this will delete all photos' - five days worth of memories, five days worth of moments caught and digitized, five days worth of a trip i'll never duplicate in my life...completely gone in that instant.  

it's time to get a new camera.