diff --git a/examples/node/basic.js b/examples/node/basic.js
index 89f6c3c..0593892 100644
--- a/examples/node/basic.js
+++ b/examples/node/basic.js
@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
+var path = require('path');
 var Tesseract = require('../../') // replace this with require('tesseract.js')
+var image = path.resolve(__dirname, 'cosmic.png');
 
-Tesseract.recognize('cosmic.png')
+Tesseract.recognize(image)
 .then(function(data){
 	console.log(data.text)
 })
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/examples/node/detect.js b/examples/node/detect.js
index 256ecfa..760b275 100644
--- a/examples/node/detect.js
+++ b/examples/node/detect.js
@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
+var path = require('path');
 var Tesseract = require('../../') // replace this with require('tesseract.js')
+var image = path.resolve(__dirname, 'cosmic.png');
 
-Tesseract.detect('cosmic.png')
+Tesseract.detect(image)
 .progress(function(info){
 	console.log(info)
 })
diff --git a/src/node/index.js b/src/node/index.js
index a5e2603..0f6eed1 100644
--- a/src/node/index.js
+++ b/src/node/index.js
@@ -32,6 +32,7 @@ function loadImage(image, cb){
     // TODO: support URLs
     if(typeof image === 'string'){
         fs.readFile(image, function(err, buffer){
+            if (err) throw err;
             loadImage(buffer, cb)
         })
         return