Camera update

My good old Nikon 6000 is on its way to the service center again -- its fourth trip in the last year -- to see if they'll fix the latch.  On its previous sojourns to be repaired I have used my second-best camera, my old Olympus, which has coped with easy tasks but isn't up to anything serious such as tricky focus.

But this time I decided to buy a new camera instead of just coping.  After 23,000 photos, who knows how much longer the Nikon may hold out.  Kim the world's greatest camera salesperson told me today that camera hardware does sometimes give up the ghost.  In particular, the gears that open the lens and then extend it to the proper focus are subject to wear, and we're talking about many tens of thousands of operations already completed.  And that's not to mention this Nikon's propensity for breaking.

When I looked at new cameras I decided that what I basically wanted was the same thing I already have -- a small camera that will fit in my pocket.  Kim suggested I look at the idiot-proof models guaranteed to survive being dropped, submerged, nuclear-bombed, etc. but none of them zoom more than 5X, and I've been spoiled with the 7X on my Nikon and don't want to trade down.

So we looked at Nikon's next plateau up, the 8200, a little bigger, a little heavier, with a 14X zoom.  But then I wondered whether I might be happy without going up the food chain, and looked at the Nikon 6200, which is basically my old camera in its 2012 guise.  No new bells and whistles, but three improvements over my June 2010 version:  a 10X zoom instead of 7X, a better sensor, and a lower pricetag.

When we put the 8200 side-by-side with the 6200, the choice was easy.  In buying the larger model, I'd pay $75 for a longer zoom, but wouldn't get any more pixels, any better sensor or any fancy new features.  And it would be a bit more cumbersome to shlep around.

So here are the Nikon twins.  On the top, the old Nikon 6000; on the bottom, the new Nikon 6200.  The new one is a hair smaller in size (a plus), better in capacity.  And it's red! 

I hope 6200 will be as good as its brother in terms of photo quality and ease of use.  And I really hope it will never acquire its brother's bad habit of visiting the Nikon service center with every change of season.

New year, new camera issues

If you get a lift out of schadenfreude, you've probably enjoyed my recurring tales of woe regarding my Nikon Coolpix camera.  I bought it in June 2009 and it has traveled with me to five of the seven continents and staunchly taken 23,000 photos.  A real trouper -- that is, when it isn't in the shop.

Twice it's been in for repairs when the eyelids failed to retract fully and expose the entire lens.  (It still took pictures, but they had black triangles at northeast and southwest.)  Once it was in for mysterious spots on the lens, which congnoscenti thought were specks of dust on the sensor but actually were serious enough to warrant a new lens.

The last time it came home from the shop I made a wry comment noting that it still had several months to go on its warranty and wondering what might happen next.

Well, here's the answer.

There's a little door on the bottom of the camera that opens up to reveal the battery and memory card.  When you close the door, you slide a button to close the latch.  The latch consists of a metal tongue that slips underneath a thin ledge of plastic.

Except that this morning I found the little ledge of plastic on my desk, right underneath the open door of the camera.

Perhaps if you were designing a camera you would have the latch mechanism made entirely of metal for greater durability, but you obviously didn't design this one.

So here's the camera in its new getup.  Much classier than duct tape, don't you think?

Although it takes pictures just fine, I hate to see those four months of unused warranty go to waste.  One of these days I'll have to visit Kim my favorite camera salesperson and see whether she has the chutzpah to send this back to the Nikon service center yet again.  Or maybe I'll just make lemonade and buy a new camera, one without a jinx.

20,000 and counting

A few days ago my camera, which I bought in June 2010, flipped its odometer for the third time, and started counting again at 0000.  That means I've taken 20,000 photos in 17 months, actually more like 15 months if you subtract its three vacations in the Nikon service center.

The high mileage testifies to how seriously I have taken to daily photography; I almost always have the camera in my pocket when I leave home, thus allowing me to take advantage of serendipitous photos like this one:

Or this (yes, I know it's bad practice to take pictures while driving, but the light had just changed and we weren't even moving yet...):

The bad part of flipping the odometer is that now you have three photos named DSCN0032 or whatever.  I've always wondered why Nikon chose to have its naming protocol perform so inefficiently -- fully half of the characters allotted to naming are wasted, while the remaining four don't last all that long for serious photographers.

As a result, my photo folders often have problems.  My food folder, for instance, might have a bunch of Thanksgiving pictures, taken the first time I hit a certain neighborhood in the numbering protocol, interspersed with some of the summer garden from the second time around.  As I go through the folder, I'll come upon a turkey (DSCN3724), then a tomato (DSCN3724 - 2), then another turkey (DSCN3725), then another tomato (DSCN3725 - 2).   I know I could change the names and call them turkey 1 and tomato 1, but I'm getting old and life seems too short.

By contrast, I loved the naming protocol for my old Olympus cameras.  As far as I can deduce, a photo might be named P6263724, which means it was taken on June 26 and was numbered 3724.  The next photo might be named P6273725, which means it was taken on June 27, but the ID numbers, so to speak, continued consecutively.   The same eight characters as Nikon, but a lot more information and a lot less opportunity to trip over your own feet.  Even if you went around the four-digit odometer a hundred times, what are the chances that photo number 3724 would be taken on the same date as on a previous circuit?

But if that's the biggest complaint I have about my camera, I'm a happy camper.  At least it's in my pocket these days and not in the Nikon service center.  Hope it holds on for another 10,000 pictures!

Camera woes, the latest installment

If you are of a certain age, perhaps you remember Joe Btfsplk, a comic strip character who came with a permanent black cloud over his head and brought bad luck wherever he wandered.  I'm beginning to think that I got a free (unwanted) lifetime membership in the Joe Btfsplk assistance society when I bought my first digital camera.  But fast forward to my fourth and current digital camera, which yet again paid a visit to the Nikon service center.

This camera is 14 months old and it's just back from its third trip this year to see the folks.  Its problem this time was the same as the first time -- the little eyelids that retract to expose the lens suddenly refused to retract all the way.  With the result that my photos looked like this:

During the two weeks the camera was away being fixed, I spent a lot of time wondering why this keeps happening.  I never drop my camera, never take it to the beach to get sand into its innards.  I don't leave it in the hot car or pile bricks on top of it.  I don't drop it in puddles or leave it out in the rain.

What I do is carry it around in my pocket every day, and now I'm wondering whether the poor baby is so delicate that it needs better treatment than that.  But heck, it's advertised as a "pocket camera" and you might think it could go in your pocket without being fatally injured.

Closer inspection reveals that the Nikon seems to have highly vulnerable eyelids.  They're big, and they're not very firmly attached; the lightest touch makes them flutter.

By contrast, my previous camera, an Olympus, has a tiny eye, and it's recessed a bit. 

Now, of course, I'm gunshy.  I don't want to put my camera in a case -- I carry it while I walk, and might shoot 100 photos on a good day, and if I had to take it out and put it back into a case with each shot my walk would take twice as long.  I don't want to carry it around my neck because I hate heavy things hanging on me.  (And I wonder why, if the camera is so delicate, Nikon issued me a wrist strap and no case when I bought it!)

What I adore about my little camera is its portability.  I like having it in my pocket at all times because you never know when you'll run across something that cries out to be documented.  Especially when you travel, you want the camera handy, so you don't have to fumble in your bag as you pause in the middle of a street, inviting pickpockets or vehicular homicide. And sometimes you don't want to have the camera visible unless you're actually taking a picture.  If I have to give up that portability, I'm not sure I even want to play the game.

But now I'm spooked.  Maybe I just have to find one dedicated pocket and put nothing in it but the camera.  Or maybe when the two-year service warranty runs out, I need to buy another camera, chosen specifically to be bulletproof.  If you have advice or suggestions, I'm open to ideas.

Home again

In the olden days of wind-up wristwatches, I used to jinx my timepieces.  Whatever the cause, every watch I ever wore ran slow.  Was it magnetism, personal or extraterrestrial?  (Perhaps I should have worn an aluminum foil hat.)  Or were my appliances simply reflecting my life?  (I generally ran slow, too.)

Fortunately they invented battery-powered watches and I've been on time ever since, or at least my watch has.  But I wonder whether my personal magnetism has transferred its mischief to my digital cameras. 

My first Olympus lasted for three years, until it started to eat batteries.  It hit its death throes in the middle of a Nancy Crow workshop, when I realized it had taken all of three photos on a new set of batteries.  I went out to Best Buy that evening and bought a new Olympus, which was smaller, fancier, with a larger display screen, and cheaper than my old one -- technological progress at its best.

That one lasted four years, but started to get crabby, sometimes refusing to focus.  Last year I decided to upgrade to a third Olympus, which I loved for five days until it lost a vital part.  I took it back and switched to a Nikon, which I also loved, until one day the metal eyelids that protect the lens refused to retract.  Three weeks in the shop, and it came back, just in time for me to take it on vacation, and I was so happy.

Until I noticed that my photos had spots on them..

Well, you get the idea.  At first I thought the spots were crud on the outside of the lens, but they were uncleanable.  One of the professional photographers on my cruise thought they were specks of dust on the sensor, which would have to be fixed by taking the camera apart.

Eight thousand miles and three thousand photos later, I had gotten pretty good at framing my shots so that the largest spot would sit on top of something dark and busy rather than on top of empty sky.  It wasn't like dropping your camera overboard on the first day of the cruise, but it was a pain.

So back to the shop, the minute we got home from the far ends of the earth.  And Tuesday afternoon it came home again, just one week past its first birthday, with a new lens yet!  Had it gotten marred by the faulty eyelid, or maybe suffered collateral damage while the eyelid was being repaired?  Was there dust on the sensor?  Who knows.   Fortunately this camera has a two-year warranty.  How many more adventures will it have in its lifetime?  I hope not many.

PS -- my second Olympus, still crabby and sometimes reluctant to focus, has been a trooper, doing its best on days when the Nikon is in the shop.  Just as I think no serious sewist should have only one sewing machine, I think it's a really good idea to have a backup camera.

Photo crisis -- happy ending -- part 2

If you read my blog last fall you may recall my horror story about computer failure and concomitant loss of a whole lot of photos.  We were able to recover most of the important ones, but some were lost forever.  I got over it, but every now and then would think of a photo that I vividly recalled taking -- but didn't have any more.  Fortunately the daily photos that I posted to my blog remain in cyberspace, but I still was missing about two months of everything else I shot.

Recently something bad happened to my nine-month-old camera, and for three weeks I had to use my old one.  A couple of times I got the dreaded "no more room on your memory card" message, had to delete last week's photos as I stood there on the street, and thought how much better my new camera is, with its much larger card. 

It took a while for the other shoe to drop.  Namely, the realization that my old camera actually had two memory cards: a small one that was my first purchase, a larger one that I bought in anticipation of a long international trip.  (Technology being the way it is, I paid less for the larger one than I had for the smaller one a year earlier.)

I had taken the large card out of the old camera, which had been retired months earlier, when I gave it to my husband for his January vacation in Arizona.  Why?  Because the large card still contained a couple of photos of my mother, who died in 2008.  For sentimental reasons I liked to keep them on the card, and it seemed easier to sub in the empty small card than explain to my husband, a camera novice, what was going on with the large card.

Finally, several days later, I had a moment of blinding insight.  What else, besides the photos of Mom, might be on that memory card, sitting for months in my jewelry chest?

Well guess what!  Over 1,400 photos from the lost two months!  Not everything I lost, but a whole lot of it.  Some that I remembered, some that I didn't, some that were pretty good.  For instance --

And finally, here's one of the photos that I was saving all along.  That's my daughter-in-law with the bottle of wine; we're on the deck of her new house.  Mom was able to attend my son's wedding six months before she died, and then come back to see the new house, the last time she visited us.

Thanks Mom!  You helped me out of another jam, perhaps the ten thousandth time in my life that you came to the rescue.

So I'm a happy camper today.  Why did it take another photo crisis to make me remember the solution to the previous photo crisis?  Can I please stop having photo crises?

Photo crisis -- happy ending -- part 1

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how my camera suddenly developed a distressing ailment -- its eyelids failed to retract fully.  If you didn't mind a black triangle over one corner of your photo, you could keep shooting forever.  But I'm so picky, I took it in for service. 

Meanwhile I've spent two and a half weeks using my old camera.  I remember why I upgraded -- its ability to focus had started to flag as it got older.   For instance, here's a piece of artwork from the Fantastic Fibers show in Paducah that I shot a half dozen times and never could bring into focus. 

Mandi Ballard, Tubez


















It's a neat piece, with LED lights inside the tubes, but beyond the capabilities of my camera.  By the way, the show organizers are going to have photos of all the pieces on a website soon, so be patient and you will be able to see this work as it deserves to be seen.  I'll let you know when they get the images up.

A week after I took the camera in, Kim, my favorite salesperson, called to tell me that the Nikon guy had taken a look at it.  The view screen was cracked and could be repaired for $99. 

I flipped out.  The view screen was just fine when I handed it in. Kim looked more closely at the paperwork and confirmed that yes, she had looked at the camera and no, there wasn't a crack in the screen.  Kim called Nikon back.  Apparently they got my camera mixed up with another one.  They did fix what was actually wrong with it, and it was under warranty.  (I should hope so.)

I checked on the progress of the camera repair on Monday and was relieved to learn that it had been fixed and was being checked by quality control as we spoke.  But would it be back before we left for a week at the beach tomorrow morning?

YES!  It's so nice to have my toy at hand.  Stay tuned for nice ocean photos next week.

Photo crisis du jour

Monday I was walking home from the store and saw a beautiful scene, with a huge forsythia in full bloom emerging from behind a wooden fence.  Whipped out my camera, took a picture, checked the view screen -- and wondered what the black fuzzy triangle was at the lower left. 

You guessed it, the eyelids that are supposed to retract to reveal the lens weren't retracting all the way.  What had happened?  Fifteen minutes previously everything was OK.  The only thing I'd put in my pocket since stowing the camera was a folded sheet of paper, but maybe that was enough to give the camera a shiner.

Yesterday I took the camera in to the shop and bade it good-bye as it went off to be fixed.  Then headed out for my walk.

I have a backup camera, the old one that I upgraded from last summer, but it wasn't charged up and ready to go with me.  So I was camera-less on this walk, the first time that's happened in many months.  And I realized in a very short time how naked and unprepared I felt.

It's been about two years since I started carrying a camera every time I took a walk.  It has changed the way I look at things -- I'm always seeing photo ops in the most unlikely places.  Sometimes I just look at colors and textures and how they juxtapose.

But more often I find beauty, decrepitude, humor and just plain weirdness.  In my hour of walking yesterday I saw at least twenty things that I wanted to document -- but wait!  No camera!

I came home and plugged in the battery charger for the old camera.  Maybe tomorrow I'll retrace my steps and get photos of the pumpkin in the alley (could it have been purchased before Halloween and still look that good??) and the boat hiding in a garage and the flowering quince in full bloom.  Everywhere you look there's a picture to be taken, but you need that camera in your pocket.

My new toy part 2

My new camera, an Olympus Stylus 7030, lasted five days out of the box before it developed a fatal flaw. Seems that the little door that opens up to let you plug in the USB cable fell off and disappeared. Unfortunately, only half the door disappeared – the half that lets you get your fingernail under to pop it open. The half of the door that remains tightly shut protecting the cable interface is still there.

Note lack of little door over the off-white plastic area on the left.  I suppose you could try opening the inner plastic door with needlenose tweezers, but that would be no fun.

If you can't get to the cable interface, you can’t access your pictures, nor can you recharge your battery. (Minor obstacles.)

I took it back to the camera store (again, it pays to buy locally) and the clerk said she had another one of that same model lose its little door while she was standing at the counter selling it. We agreed this was a serious design flaw. My first thought was to upgrade to another Olympus with a better little door, bigger display screen, twice as much internal memory and 7X zoom instead of 5X.

I had to come back the next day with the box, all the cables, the battery charger, etc. By then I had talked with a friend and contemplated whether I really wanted to stick with Olympus. I have owned four Olympi (one film, three digital) and I do feel a certain fondness for the brand. I am comfortable with the way it organizes its options and controls and I want to spend as little time as possible learning new systems.

HOWEVER, I have sort of learned how to use the computer program that comes with the camera, and while I can see how some features might come in useful, I hate most of how it operates. It won’t let me resize my pictures to 800 pixels wide for easy loading to the blog. It makes me click through an elaborate menu of stuff I don’t want to do every time I transfer images from the camera to the computer – for example, the first thing that comes up is a map of the world so you can tag your pictures geographically.  And its cool white-type-on-black layout is unreadable for me.

So yesterday I had a heart-to-heart with Kim, the best photo store clerk I’ve ever met, and we decided that I should abandon Olympus and get a Nikon. She told me to take all the photos off my new memory card, then pop it into the Nikon and reformat just to make sure no repressed Olympus memories came back to haunt me.

But wait! How could I take the photos off the memory card? My old Olympus uses a different kind of card, and the new Olympus wouldn’t let me download my photos before I brought it back, because of its broken door. Not to worry -- Kim gave me a card reader device for free! Another reason to patronize your local camera store instead of buying online.

So now I am the snakebit and wary owner of a Nikon Coolpix S6000, 14.2 megapixels, 7X zoom. The card reader worked – thanks, Kim! – but I still have a bunch of computer issues to work through, since my old Windows XP is too geriatric to support the Nikon software and I haven’t yet figured out how to edit the images.

In the olden days you bought a camera and went out and took pictures. Now you have to access a whole support system to make the camera work. Yes, I know I could give my soul to Google (or at least the part they don’t already have) and manage my pictures online, but I have a perhaps irrational desire to keep my images on my computer, not throw them into cyberspace and hope they don’t get into trouble. I’ll figure out something. Meanwhile I hope my new new camera behaves better and lasts longer than my old new camera. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

My new toy

Perhaps you have noticed how in the last couple of weeks my photos have gotten kind of awful. I have been noticing for several weeks that my beautiful little camera has gotten cranky. Some days it refuses to be reset from no-flash to flash, or it tells me it’s on flash but isn’t. Some days it refuses to do macro focus. More worrisome, it’s been getting harder and harder to simply take photos that are in good focus.

I know that the heart of point-and-shoot cameras is the microprocessor that reads the scene and adjusts the focus and exposure time (do they still call it exposure, now that there’s no film to expose?). I have also realized, as I’m taking more photos and trying to do a better job of it, that you often have to fool your camera into doing what you want. For instance, when shooting a scene with a bright, light object in a dark ground, you have to aim to get some light and some dark in your little central viewfinder box. If you have only dark in the viewfinder, the picture will be too light and washed out; if you have only light, most of the picture will be dark and unreadable.

But lately my camera has been behaving badly even on scenes that should be no-brainers. Here are a couple of pictures that should never have come out this way.

I’ve been taking five or six shots of everything I do, hoping that one of them will be good enough to use. Finally it seeped in to my retailphobic brain that it was time for a new camera. I had been resisting because I love everything about my current camera (except for the fact that it doesn’t work). It’s tiny enough to go in my pocket, very important since I haven’t carried a purse in years. And I understand how it’s organized. The older I get the less I want to take the time to learn new operating systems, whether they’re on my camera, my computer, my sewing machines, my TV or my one-way street traffic pattern.

Fortunately my sister is my polar opposite when it comes to retail, and during her visit last week she dragged me out to spend some money. After she spiffed up my wardrobe she helped me buy a new camera that is – wonder of wonders – a new-improved-but-hardly-changed-at-all version of my old camera! And then today I attended the two-hour free class that came with the camera (one advantage of patronizing your local camera store instead of buying online). Already I have learned about features that I think were on my old camera(s) but I never knew existed, let alone how to use.

And I learned that much of the beautiful photo quality that will come with the new camera will be wasted on my blog viewers, and in fact on myself, since I generally enjoy my pictures on the computer rather than printing them out. (This practice was frowned upon by Neil, our instructor, who pointed out that not only are prints the best way to look at images, but they are by far the best and most reliable method of long-term storage.) Nevertheless, even us quality-deprived folks who will look at the images on screens should be able to tell the difference between in-focus and not-in-.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to use the new software so I can get the photos from the camera into the computer.  Surely I can achieve marginal competence on that within this century.