Thursday, January 21, 2016

AAAAARGH!!!

I was SO looking forward yesterday to a lovely walk at Moreau Lake.  The lake is now frozen over solidly from shore to shore, so I could walk directly across it to visit a brook I expected to be decorated with all kinds of crystalline ice sculptures.  Also, the sky was blue and the wind was relatively quiet for a change.




Wearing ice grippers on my feet to prevent me from slipping, I made a beeline across the lake, noting the ice's thickness by the size of the prodigious cracks visible through the clear black ice.




I marveled at the size of some of the bubbles that had been captured in the clear ice.





Before long, I reached the shore where the brook runs into the lake, carefully skirting the area where its turbulent running water might thin out the ice.  But I needn't have worried about running water in the brook on this day.  To all appearances, it was now quite dry.





Teetering from rock to rock along the streambed, though, I could see that water had coursed through here not long before, leaving its evidence in the icicles descending from overhanging banks.  I clambered on, hoping to find still-coursing water and more elaborate ice structures higher up on the mountain side.  But then I dropped my camera.  Lens open, it bounced from rock to rock with a sickening crack.





When I picked my camera up, part of the lens apparatus came off in my hand, and when I pushed the off button, the display revealed this image of purple and green blurs. Uh oh!





After repeated tries to replace the parts and restart my camera, I realized all was lost.  Yes, it would still take pictures, but the images looked like this.  This was supposed to be a photo of the treeline along the lake shore.  Kind of interesting, I admit, but not what I use my camera for.  Unfortunately, it's time to get a new one.


4 comments:

The Furry Gnome said...

Oh, too bad! You've shot so many outstanding pictures with that camera!

Jeff Nadler said...

I have a Canon S90. I believe it is the model just before yours. I no longer use it. You are welcome to have it free! Call me on my cell if interested. The only feature it does not do is full Hd video at 1080p. My number is on my website or you may still have it. Jeff

Laura Lee Johnston said...

AAAAARGH!!! would be my comment too! I rarely have what I would call nightmares, but the worst of them is that there's something wrong with my camera: the film is jammed or has run out and I don't have any more (my dreams remember old stuff!) or that I dropped it and the lens went to pieces. I sympathize with you from the bottom of my being. Yours is the experience of my worst dreams. (and - Jeff Nadler, you are a generous soul to offer your camera to keep one of our favorite photographers and writers going on with the blog we've all come to love.)

Woody Meristem said...

I feel your pain; a couple of years ago I slipped on ice and fell on my camera which drove the lens into the body. The camera went to the morgue and I got a new one of the same model. Such is life. Console yourself with the fact that cameras are built to take a certain number of pictures (e.g. 100,000, 250,000) so it would have come to the end of its useful life at some point - and the more photos you take the more quickly that would have come.