Waning days
Posted on September 11th, 2026 – Be the first to commentYou may have noticed that I haven’t posted many photos recently. Truth is, I think that my camera might be on its last legs.
It’s suffered some damage — not all at once but the accumulation appears to have caught up. I tend to put my cameras through their paces so arriving at this point is not entirely unexpected. Still, the imminent retirement’s a little sad.
For a while the problem was just a cracked body. As a result, controls were a bit wonky but otherwise the photos still looked good. Then the camera took some more damage, this time to the lens, and after that the writing was on the wall.
Up until now I’ve muddled through as best as I could but the equipment’s producing some moody pics these days.
Brief panoramas are still workable but most of manual mode has become unusable.
The image stabilizer’s shot so if I optically zoom in too far it becomes nearly impossible to focus or to keep the subject in frame. At the same time, something in the lens casing, probably the image stabilizer ring, has shifted and now produces a noticeable vignette in one corner; only way to get around it is to zoom in.
Basically, zoom in too far: no good; don’t zoom in enough: no good.
On top of that are the randomly switching settings like exposure, f-stop, even the shooting mode. I consider myself lucky when I hit the shutter button and the camera takes an actual photo instead of powering off or recording video instead.
The pictures in this post are from this past Monday. I thought I might take some snaps of the air show during the last day of the Ex but with the aforementioned zoom problem it’s clear that my optimism was misplaced. Even when, by some fantastic stroke of luck, I actually managed to snap a pic the colour balance was off. Don’t even get me started on the contrast.
Maybe these settings silently switch between shots. Maybe the optical sensor is also damaged. At this point it could be anything and post facto image editing just isn’t cutting it.
I still have access to a couple of small old Cannon point-and-shoot pocket cameras that I might be able to use but, as hard as it is to accept, this season marks the end of an era.
Goodbye, old friend.
... with pictures
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