Sunday 22 July 2012

My camera died yesterday :'(

Yesterday I visited the 2012 river festival in bedford, the second largest festival in the UK (the first being Notting Hill).

Over 2 whole days the entire river and surrounding area plays host to hundreds of thousands of people, fireworks, river events with parades and Viking dragon boat races, several music stages, beer, local and non-local food (mmm the Swedish mango beer was nice), a carnival, flypast and more I will go see later today.

It was at this festival yesterday that I lost a dear friend. My camera.

I love photography, and am a big fan of film. I don't use film at the moment due to space issues but that's changing. Other than my phone I have only 2 digital cameras, a Fuji s8000fd and a Canon HV30 HD camcorder.

I tend to leave the HV30 for filming purposes as it is a camcorder, but it dose take still photos, better than the Fuji tbh.

The Fuji was my first proper digital camera. It was a birthday present from 2007 I think. I have used it at events like the festival, holidays and family birthdays. It also took one of the first pictures of my first newborn nephew.

Its been love hate. I have loved some of its features and hated the lack of, or stupidity of others lol. I never felt it could replace my film slr's. Manual focus was laughable, the electronic viewfinder was useless (viewfinders should be high resolution or optical with digital overlay) and high speed shooting wasn't what I wanted it to be.

However it was very good at macro, brilliant at letting me preview depth of field no matter what the aperture (you can loose so much light with a film camera its difficult to preview) and had a nice flash.

Sad to say I can't use it anymore. Yesterday while recording a demo of some Greek hoplites fighting some barbarians I noticed the image started looking like it was on fire! I knew it was the ccd, but I didn't think much of it as I have noticed funny things before with this camera. This time it was different because the distortion was recorded to the video and still images.

It went back to normal after I rebooted it. For a few mins I got some more video till I noticed more purple fires here and there, the image flickered, the hoplites started to melt into the scene, then it was normal, then it happened again and stayed that way.

Switch off, then on. Same.

Reset all settings. Same.

Take out batteries to try and 'cold boot'. No change.

At home upgrade firmware. Purple fire effect is now orange.

I did some Googling and found that it is a defect that affected many camera years ago. Looks like I was lucky it lasted so long:

http://www.imaging-resource.com/badccds.html

Well, now I can get that D-SLR I was thinning of upgrading to.

Goodbye old friend.