Gift Fish

I was meaning to buy a new camera. In the deep, dark recesses of my heart, my major hope upon getting out of grad school was to be able to actually afford my hobbies. My prior small camera, a canon A570is gave up the ghost nearly a year ago. However, numerous little things have stood in the way of this: the rent rates in NoVA, the need to save $$ for the next disaster, the Volvo, Christmas, doctors appointments, wedding expenses, congress threatening to shut down the government. In other words, the usual suspects.

I have been sort of frustrated by not having a second, smaller, cheaper camera because many of my best photos come from things I discover and photograph.

A blanket email at work on Thursday announced that an old Nikon digital camera was up for grabs. I ran to the secretaries office (having missed an F3 under similar circumstances). The camera turned out to be a Coolpix 950. Old heavy and huge, and in a nice travel case with many unused accessories, including two 96 meg CF cards and an 8 meg card woo!  Time warp.

That it used CF cards and ran on AA batteries made it a tempting toy. Unlike the quicktake, it was unlikely to become OBE simply due to the obsolesce of a certain computer operating system. It's computer link cable, a serial cable, was untouched in it's shipping baggy.

The previous user hadn't set the clock, but it appeared that the last photos were taken during the Clinton administration. A lot of them were corrupted.

I put batteries in it that evening, and took a few photos. It started making more corrupted photos. Perhaps that explains why it had gone unused? Bad sensor? I wasn't expecting much, but my heart sank. Googling offered few clues. After letting it sit for a day, the problem vanished. The nikon webpage suggested a firmware update, so I've done that. It's been squirting out 2 megapixel images all day.

Squirting may not be the right adjective. It's clearly a blast from the past, and can only handle a picture every few seconds. It's auto-focus hunts alot. But then, it's a 12 year old camera...

My 9 year old mac loves opening and closing the resulting files, and they are perfectly sized to upload to Picasa.

I'll keep it around to play with until i can afford something pocket sized. I think it's resolution will limit its utility because it won't yield good prints, there's so much that I just want a digital or 4x6 image of.

Mysterious image corruption. The sony did this some times.

Wide angle fun.

Macro fun

More wide angle fun.