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Sunday, February 19, 2006
Driveup camp 
And save 5 figures a month on PR
And lucky
| | The last I remember using my camera — source of more than six thousand pictures I've put on Flickr, 23hq and BubbleShare — was on Thursday. I was next door, shooting pictures of walls in the new house, documenting infrastructure before the sheetrock goes up. I remembered setting the camera down once, then picking it up again. I also sort-of remembered having its strap slung over my shoulder when I came back home through a side door. My wife also remembered that as the last time she saw me with the camera. |
| | I had searched the house, the other house, the cars... over and over again. |
| | Meanwhile, we had two days of heavy rain, our first this Winter. Good for the plants, and a welcome delay for the fire season; but bad for a camera. If I'd left it outside. |
| | I kept thinking... did I leave it outside? Where? |
| | Then yesterday, while we were preparing to have guests over, I looked below the pool to our little orchard of small citrus trees. And there was the camera, on a large rock: exactly where I had set it on Thursday, when I took a detour through the orchard on my way back to the house from next door. Now I remembered. And now it had been outside for two days. |
| | Worse, the rock is soft sandstone, and rain had splattered sand and dirt all over the camera. |
| | I took the camera up to the house and used a soft brush to remove most of the mess. Since it had been sitting out in the sunlight for most of Saturday, and since it's black and was still warm, it appeared to be dry. |
| | So I turned it on. Nothing happened. I came inside and got a fresh battery. It started back up. I took a picture of the next approaching rainstorm. It worked. |
| | Later, when I removed the memory card and copied off the last round of pictures, I found two shots, both taken on Friday: one at 1:21:18pm, and the other at 1:42:14pm. Both were shot, apparently, by the camera itself while it sat on the rock, lacross vegetation at the side of the pool, through a wet lens. That's one of them at the top of this post. |
| | I guess the rain woke the camera up and it took a shot when more rain shorted the shutter circuitry. And then did it again a few minutes later. Weird. |
| | Now it's the next day. The camera has been slowly recovering. At first the menu and several of the control buttons didn't work. Then it died outright when I tried shooting with an attached flash. But now everything seems to check out, though I'll probably bring it into the shop for a thorough cleaning later. |
| | Still pretty amazing, considering. |
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