I was going to write about how I spent most of yesterday on my screen porch. I was supposed to be writing, and I did write, a little bit, but mostly I watched three humongous crows take turns landing on the gutter on the corner of the roof. After watching carefully, I realized that they were eating something that must have died in my gutter. Ugh! I’m glad they were eating whatever was dead and in the gutter so my porch office didn’t smell like roadkill, but do you know what a ten-pound crow landing on a tin roof sounds like? It sounds like a huge beastie scratching with mega-sharp nails on the hinges of your closet in the middle of the night. It is not a sound conducive to writing. Particularly when it causes your cats to mewl and jump around instead of sleeping peacefully next to your feet like good writers’ cats should.
But that’s not what I’m going to write about. I’m going to write about my lens despair.
Today, I spent no time on the porch office because I was running around conducting interviews and taking photos for my “real” job. I’ve loved the challenge of adding photojournalism to my creative mix these past months, but I must admit, here, that really, I have no idea how my fancy digital camera works. Luckily, I have a good eye and a helpful handbook and lots of experience with film cameras.
For my birthday, I got a super-cool zoom lens that rocked DILOA and which, despite its weight and the fact that it is so long and heavy hanging down my front that I finally understand what it must feel like to be a man, the lens has suddenly and inexplicibably fritzed out. My camera just stopped reading its settings, making it null and void. A few days ago, I took the super-cool lens to the camera shop. The wizened and black-toothed guy there, who has dealt with millions of camera disfunctions, said he’d never seen anything quite like it. “Send it back to Nikon,” he said. I smiled and slipped him my dentist’s phone number.
I have yet to send the lens back because Nikon’s on-line packing instructions are way too complex for someone who thinks birthday gifts are best wrapped in paper towels and Ziplock baggies.
Then, today, I conducted a fairly difficult interview with a very interesting man, who is originally from a country far, far away. Despite the fact that he’s lived in the US for years, I could barely understand him. I could get the jist, but I wasn’t getting good details or quotes, which are the slab foundation on which my articles are built. So after asking him to repeat his answers 17 times, I decided it was time to take photos. I followed him into the industrial kitchen of his restaurant, pulled my camera out, which I had just been using an hour before at my daughter’s school, and the fricking regular lens decided not to communicate with my camera!
I was already feeling inept from the interview, but as I clicked through all the camera settings, turned the damn thing on and off, I started to feel really ridiculous. Then when I took the lens off to see if jamming it back on would help, I DROPPED it. On the tile floor. Thank you, photographer friend, who told me to put UV filters on all my lens. The filter bent and cracked, but the lens itself seemed fine. Although it still refused to talk to the camera.
Luckily, I had Ash’s zoom with me, which he’d kindly lent me while he’s out of town, or I would have been screwed, as I had scheduled back to back interview/photo shoots. Of course, with the zoom, I had to stand like 1/2 a mile away from my subjects, not ideal in a crowded kitchen or in the smallish home where I shot later. Arggggh! Between my camera, the lack of RAM on my hard drive, and the weird-ass e-mail delays I’ve been experiencing, I’m wondering if the Luddites had the right idea. I think my ancient electric Smith-Corona is still in Mom’s basement.
So, does anyone have any knowledge or experience with digital lens despair? And Ash, could you stay out of town for a few days longer?
