Death of a camera: Part I

Okay, so it seems as if I didn’t get raptured, but you know what did? My camera. This is the first in a series of blog posts about my nearly-dead camera. Included in this series will be images that I haven’t posted to flickr. Don’t get all excited; they’re worse than my other shots. That’s why they didn’t even make the flickr cut.

In anticipation of a trip to Germany back in 2008, I spent a few months trying to figure out what camera would be right for me. Considering that I average about three rolls of 24 ((How many people can figure out why I shoot rolls of 24 rather than the more economical rolls of 36?)) per day when on a shooting spree, the economics of replacing my film SLR with a digital one for a two/three week trip made perfect sense (yes, I did consider other types of digital cameras).

Since I already had a few good Nikon-mount lenses (and finding the prospect of picking up a few more old-school manual-focus lenses for a song — at least relatively — to my liking), a new Nikon D300 beat out my other choices: the inexpensive Nikon D40, a used Nikon D200, and the more expensive Canon EOS 5d. With three years of warranty (manufacturer + credit card feature), I decided to give this whole “digital SLR” thing a try ((Having previously shot with a Fuji FinePix S5100 while working on the Trinity College yearbook, the idea of the camera automagically recording camera settings used to take a shot rather than having to carry around a notebook was highly appealing.)) with a planned reevaluation and replacement of my purchase in three years. Well, it’s the future now. But, first, a bit of retrospective…

Though my trip wasn’t until May, I’d be crazy to use some new electronic gizmo for the first time then. Besides, a hypothetical camera can’t take pictures now. Thus, I pulled the trigger by picked up my camera on a February morning in 2008 and then went postal by shooting Jorge, kicking off my most capital-intensive experiment to date. Back in November 2007, the TTC had raised fares, so I had stocked up on tokens. In February 2008, I still had most of these left ((Due to the size of my hoard and frequent Metropass purchases, I haven’t had to buy tokens since.)). Ah, the first few test shots ((Shooting brick walls as test frames is silly.)) when my camera was young!