Oh, what a hit you would be

[austin_dern]

My camera, nice faithful thing that it has been, started to act up recently. It wasn't doing anything really mischievous like losing pictures; it just got into a mood in which it would lose around half of the built-in settings when I turned it off or changed the batteries. This was a small nuisance in how it would switch from using the LCD screen to the tiny viewfinder (since it's not even a true optical viewfinder I don't understand that option at all; it's just a tinier screen), and more annoyingly it resets the simulated film sensitivity back to Automatic ISO. My camera has it in its head that the ISO should be as low as possible, ideally under 100. I like to set it to 400 because I might want to take pictures inside my parents' house, and the living room has slightly less ambient light than developing dark rooms have.

Something rather like this had happened a couple years ago, in Singapore, when the internal battery -- designed to hold settings and time and such between normal battery changes -- needed replacing. So I stopped in at a camera store in the mall to ask if they could change it. They could send it in for a battery change, and would along the way update its software and clean the optical elements and such, and it would cost only something like US$170. I don't know what the battery change cost two years ago in Singapore but I'm sure it wasn't that much (even thought that included replacing a dial that had been sticky ever I got a drop of Seasons Iced Tea on it at the Zoo), but the clerk at the camera store didn't have any listing for battery changes that weren't full-scale repairs.

I e-mailed my camera's manufacturer and pointed out that the price didn't make sense for the likely repair needed and could they tell me what a battery replacement would actually cost? They wrote back, nine days later, to give me the address of the web page from which I got their e-mail address, which was an answer managing to be belated, irrelevant, and trivial. I admired its transcendent uselessness, but the camera was still misbehaving.

So I looked at it to examine every single one of its 46 separate settings to see if I could inundate the manufacturers with data. Along the way I discovered: somehow I had left set the `Reset All' option on the camera, a feature which restores some -- but not all -- of the camera settings to factory defaults every time the camera is turned off. The point of this setting I also could not begin to guess at, although with that turned off, happily, it's respecting my preferences for view finder, simulated ISO, and other settings.

Trivia: The Dow-Jones Industrial Average stood on 26 May 1896, its first day of existence, at 40.94. Source: The Great Game, John Steele Gordon.

Currently Reading: Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, Stephen Bach. One of my many Charlie Brown-ish traits is a fascination with failure.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you were able to figure out the problem and I hope this means more pictures to view soon.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I really should put up more pictures. It's not taking them that's the real challenge; it's going to the effort of shrinking the files to something reasonable for the web -- like, 30 or 50 kilobytes, as oppose to their built-in several hundred kilobytes -- and with Photoshop out of action for me I don't seem to have an easy one-step way to process pictures now. I can do it through iPhoto and Preview, but that's, you know, like work.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

That's why I broke down and paid for a Flickr account. It's easy to use so laziness isn't an obstacle to showing people my photos. I suppose the fact that I'm not much a photographer should be an obstacle, but somehow it hasn't been.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh! That reminds me, I do have -- not a flickr account, but a ringo account instead. I think I might have some pictures on it, too. I should put more up.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

You should. I would like to see more of your photos.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I should post more. I just need more efficient ways to go from photograph to web-suitable photograph and clever caption, is all. It's more a matter of time management than anything else.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

arf. :/

Yeah, my nifty lil camera no longer zooms all the way.. but it's just a 2 megapixel, so probably time to upgrade.

Weird how settings can jump, huh? I just found out that my pager doesn't like non-alkaline or non-lithium batteries. The heavy-duty ones and the recharchable ones just don't last ;P And they affect your time settings!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Actually, my camera's only two megapixels too. But I have got the large optical zoom (with a zoom that's still working nicely) and a comfortably large lens, so the result looks good.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention that.. *coati fuzzles*

I did buy a 4 mpxl one a lil while back too... BASED on the lens being a nice 10x optical and on sale... but it (an Olympus) has awful focusing, cannot do it right if the light isn't good, though my Canon Elph has no trouble (only a 3x optical though).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Hm. Well, as I understand it the auto-focus on most cameras is actually meant to maximize contrast, on the assumption that won't be too far from actual focus. With that information, sometimes it's possible to figure how to better compose a shot. Or to just switch to the manual focus and get better at estimating lengths.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

hmmmm.... well, this one actually gets it *really* wrong.. lots of blurry once compared to the Canon focusing system.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Have you ruled out that you're taking photographs of things that are themselves out of focus?

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

completely... ;> *POUNCE!!*

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, there's little I can say to -- AACK! And splat!