Annals of a Broken Camera
Posted by Moose on April 29th, 2009. Filed under: Uncategorized.Any photo that’s appeared here in the last few months has been willfully stolen from someone else. Because my camera is either cranky, broken, or despises me with a curiously virulent passion. It’s a little point-and-shoot I got before leaving for Nora’s wedding in England. After the wedding, some friends and I planned to trot around the South of France, sniffing lavender and shivering pitifully in the November air.
Exhibit A
Here’s one of the first pictures I took with this camera. Sharp, clear, and with a fetching ancient background. You can practically see pores:
Shannon and Julia and me.
Exhibit B
A month or so after my trip, I ended a five year stint in the Presidio and moved to the Mission. This was my walk to work, a walk to work that altered decisively when I uprooted myself to a whole 20 minutes across town. From tramping a woodland trail to dodging plastic bags kicked up in the breeze, panhandlers, and strains of staph infection. I’m not giving Ansel Adams any competition in the artistry and execution department – but hark! YOU CAN SEE BLADES OF GRASS. Camera still functional:
Forest primeval. Except for the passing cars.
Exhibit C
This is what I looked like right after tripping over a tree root, landing on my bag with a sickening crunch, and pulling out my almost-new camera to find one very cracked LCD screen:
Events take a turn for the worse for our heroine and her camera.
(Why have a blog if you can’t call yourself a heroine? WHY INDEED.)
(In retrospect, a cracked elbow would have been worse but at the beginning of a trip, it was almost arguable which would be more useful – a working joint or a usable camera.)
We were sailing around the Caribbean in a boat that was less a yacht and more an elderly motor home. We called it the Winnebago of the Sea. All the pictures I took of that trip were done the old fashioned way – snap off a shot in the general direction of your object of interest and hope for the best. Since the screen was incommunicado, I had no bloody clue if the photo would show a dolphin leaping or the tiny splash after he disappeared under the water. (A dolphin followed the boat for a little while. We called him Tuna.) (We are going to hell.)
Exhibit D
This picture is sharp and downright respectable (Halloween! I’m dressed like the dog! And the dog is PISSED), but may have been taken with another camera:
Wherein the genesis of my photo is questionable.
Combing my brain for details only yields a memory of recklessly passing out bulging handfuls of candy until we ran out at 6:30 and had to raid the convenience store for Starburst. “Only one Starburst per child. Promise.” “But what if they’re dressed like Darth Vader and do the breathing thing while saying ‘Trick or treat’?” “ONE.”
Exhibit E
The camera’s screen was fixed, but I suspect it’s like being in a serious car accident. The broken limbs heal, but the trauma remains:
Friends over for a fancy dinner. Definitely my camera. Blurriness possibly aided by generous application of sidecars.
Exhibit F
My birthday party a few years ago. You might recognize some of those people if your vision ranges on the side of telepathic:
My vision isn’t supernatural either; I can only determine identity by process of elimination.
Exhibit G
I haven’t wrung a good picture out of my camera in a year or two. Pictures of immobile objects come out passable, but any motion is a streak that makes one think “butter smear” or “Goodness gracious, that last pot brownie was a mistake.” This is Buster, the be-sweatered chihuahua. As pictures go, it gets the job done. But it’s a little fuzzy. But then, Buster is a little fuzzy:
This is what a chihuahua looks like after an exhausting 20 minutes at the beach.
Results remain inconclusive. So I’ll continue plagiarizing other people’s photos to fool you into thinking 1) I have any photographic skill whatsoever, and 2) My camera isn’t yet another sad victim of my ability to trip over a tree root and land on the most expensive thing within three square miles.
April 29th, 2009 at 7:28 am
HMMM…. I’m assuming that you have all the settings where they should be, yeah? Nobody messed around with it and overrode some automatic setting? In Exhibits E and F, it looks like your flash isn’t firing. If you put it in “auto” mode in a low-light situation like that, your flash should fire. If it’s not, it would seem that something’s a’wrong.
April 29th, 2009 at 7:39 am
At least the camera you broke was your own! I managed to bork my parent’s underwater camera last summer by (wait for it!) using it *underwater*. I’m not even sure how a person breaks something by putting it to the use it’s explicitly intended for, but I pulled it off.
Besides, we all managed for years not knowing what a photo was going to look like until the film was exposed…the anticipation! The crushing disappointment when it was just a splash and not a dolphin! Good times.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Orrrrr you could buy a new camera
April 29th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Or take it to a camera repair shop.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:36 am
For the record, I should probably say that it’s been to the repair shop twice. And settings have been endlessly fiddled with. Conclusion: IT’S POSSESSED.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:16 am
I DO recognize Sean in Exhibit F! But I really, really, really want to know what he was laughing so uproariously about.
April 29th, 2009 at 9:47 am
I also have to encourage purchasing a new camera. Only because you’re far too adorable to not be photographed more often and with better results.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Dude. You need a new camera. STAT.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Perhaps set up an online fund for Moose’s new camera? You could quickly garner the funds to replace the poor thing and give it a proper burial. I’m in a solid $2. (Ok, so “quickly” is relative, right?)
xox
April 29th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
I would say get a new camera. The repairs are sometimes just as expensive as a new one. I love Exhibit F!
April 29th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Awww! Buster! How on earth do I leave that dog every morning and go to work? He’s too cute to be alone! Even for a second!
It seems like you’re getting pretty good camera advice here. I’ll stay out of it. I’m THE WORST about cameras. I really don’t even enjoy taking pictures, but I do it anyway. I guess I feel guilty if I don’t, like maybe I’ll regret it someday.
April 29th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I dropped my camera in water back in ought-seven, and now it only focuses when it wants to (not often). Also now the battery only lasts for about, oh, 15 minutes.
I would like a new camera, but I do not want to have to decide what kind of new camera to buy. Because there are seventy-billion choices. Each with a bazillion reviews. It’s hard work, this consumerism.
April 29th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
panasonic lumix lx3 must be the one to buy — because it shoots raw & jpg, supposedly has a great lens and – most telling – it’s on backorder
April 29th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Hey, that’s me! That was a fun trip. But how did we get the idea that southern France in November would be warm? It was freezing! And Moose never, ever complained. You’re one of my favorite traveling companions. Good luck with your camera.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
“New camera! New camera! New camera!” (Picture me chanting this with a glass of sweet tea in one hand and fried chicken in the other.*)
*Not really. Except for the sweet tea part.
April 30th, 2009 at 7:50 am
I personally think it’s a lighting issue; I wouldn’t expect indoor dinner party pictures to come out with a point-and-shoot whether your camera was broken or not. I didn’t see a shot in there that really SHOULD have come out awesome and then didn’t, just based on lighting. The pictures you’re comparing aren’t really the same in that a picture taken on a hiking trail outside and a picture taken at a candlelit party just aren’t going to be anywhere close, especially with the flash off.
Go outside and take a picture, preferably standing in the shade of a tree or something, and see how it comes out. You may still see blades of grass after all.
May 1st, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Yep, my eyesight is telepathic.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I’d say get a new camera. But then I bought one and my photos still sucked because, duh, I don’t know how to take photos.
But still, get a new camera.