Hard to believe, but there truly WAS a sense of withdrawal for me.
What to do with a whole evening and no camera!
I did solve the situation, but not without some frustration.
Yesterday afternoon I took my Canon to Image Maker for a sensor cleaning.
After more than a year with the new lens, I started noticing spots on sky and water photos----always in the same place.
A few years ago, I learned the hard way that particles do get inside one's digital camera, especially when changing lenses. The particles cause spots to show up on photos.
When we notice that they're always in the same places after downloading an afternoon's worth of the best scenic shots ever, it's time for a sensor cleaning.
I bought my new lens last year to avoid such things. It's a 3-in-1 lens (wide angle, regular and telephoto), which means it can stay on the camera at all times unless, of course, I want to buy a bigger model to get even closer to far-away subjects.
The new lens has provided me much joy over the past year and no spots until the last week or so. Mike told me cameras are never air tight, so dust particles can find their way to the inner workings of the camera.
He also told me he'd have my camera back to me today.
In the meantime, I pulled out the Olympus digital Bill bought me several years ago. Though it hasn't been touched in some time, the batteries still work.
Just had to clean a little dust film off the outside as it's been sitting on a dresser in the hallway, pretty much retired.
The major frustration with carrying that little camera around last night, just to satisfy my daily urge to take pictures, came with every photo and no clue of its quality or composition.
The window that shows us what we get when we use our digitals quit working some time ago. So, everything's a guessing game, just like it was in the good ol' days when we toted around our film cameras.
In the not too distant past, which now seems like ancient history, we had to finish the roll of film before seeing our images.
Sometimes that roll of film stayed inside the camera for several months or even a year or two before we took it to the drug store or a one-day photo shop and prayed that one or maybe two of the pictures we'd taken of company, pets or scenery would turn out worthy of showing off our friends.
It also didn't matter how bad or good the photos from that roll of film happened to be----they still cost the same amount to be processed.
My, how life has changed for us who do so much with visuals and with the written word!
I'm thinking about my Brownie camera, which resides as an antique down on the living-room window sill and I think of all that crumpled-up notebook paper which found its way to waste baskets instead of a place of honor.
Yup, dramatically upgraded tools for writing and photography have turned us into spoiled brats. Back in the day, most folks gave up on writing because they wadded up so much notebook paper after so many rotten opening sentences written with ink pens that would not erase.
A lot of folks also gave up on picture-taking after paying X amount to get a packet of maybe 12 photos with various levels of quality and frequent imperfections, ranging from clouded out images, to telephone poles coming out of visitors' heads to blurred partial figures suggesting but hardly pinpointing just what creature happened to be racing past the lens when we pointed our camera its direction.
After all, if we took the photo six months ago, how we gonna remember?
Nowadays, thanks to technological development, we're back to fully enjoying our writing and photography opportunities.
After all, instead of piles of wadded up notebook paper or total disgust at paying big bucks for a bunch of blur, we have a magical tool which helps us forget our mistakes almost instantaneously: DELETE.
DELETE and move on immediately to the next thought or image. Makes us look a lot more talented or smarter than we really are!
And, therein lies the reason I felt frustrated carrying around my Olympus last night, knowing I'd have to go inside to download all my pictures and pray that one or two turned out.
Well, here's the outcome of my evening photo adventure. When I saw the results of my walk around the yard, the two photos above and one other were somewhat worth keeping. That's from a batch of about a dozen. Delete. Delete. Delete.
By the way, those daisies in the top photo are not quite as blurry as they appear. They're covered with netting to keep the deer out.
Still, I can tell you that these will not be appearing at the Bonner County Fair competition, and I'll add that I'll be thrilled when Mike from Image Maker calls and says I can go pick up my Canon and its lovely lens.
Once again, I'll feel complete, packing that camera wherever I go, enjoying the instant gratification of deleting the bad and saving the good.
We've come a long way, baby, in so many aspects of technology.
It's fast. It takes virtually little effort to hide our mistakes, and it helps us save a little money.
Now, if we could just experience a little progress with how we handle our immediate frustration the very second our technology takes a break.
Happy Wednesday. By the way, I pushed "delete" once in the two-word sentence before this one, and it was so quick, I can't even remember why!
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