Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The Day the Cameras Died

Bye, bye Miss American Pie....

On Saturday my camera and my video camera were in a small plane flying over Clear Lake, Iowa. There was a crash. They died.

Well, it wasn't exactly like that. It was actually like this:

My camera has been breaking and fixing itself on and off since I was in Brazil. It was running with a bad crowd there - humidity and proximity to sand - and they were bad influences on it. The zoom button was particularly affected and it would start all the trouble. You hit zoom, the camera flips you the bird and shuts itself down - sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. On Saturday, at my request, Craig was using it to take pictures at the Mud Run. I forgot to tell him to avoid the Zoom Button of Death and lo and behold (look and see!) he went to zoom and the camera shut down. This time, I believe it's shut down for good. Bummer.

Later that same day, at my request, Craig was using my video camera to record my trapeze show. (Yes, there was a trapeze show! Yes, it was awesome! Yes, I got to wear tights! No, I have no video. Keep reading...) Craig sure is a nice guy to attend all my events and assist me in documenting them. Unfortunately, he is electronically cursed. The video camera has never given me a problem but with Craig at the helm it took a cue from my regular camera and started shutting itself down. Craig is fairly certain that the trapeze show was recorded but when I tried to view the video there was nothing but the empty blue screen. The camera wouldn't play back any of the other stuff that I know was on the tape.

I replaced the camera on Sunday - I'm lost without a camera. But a video camera is more than I'm willing to spend right now so I'm currently giving the broken one two aspirin and putting it down for a nap. If that doesn't work I'm going to try CPR and a defibrillator. If it's still dead, I'll try burying it in the Pet Semetary.

1 comment:

Craig Brandenburg said...

So is it simply that the playback is broken or did it not record? I am Jack's shaming sense of guilt. And I was just starting to enjoy being the camera guy, too.

Let it be known to all in case the video cannot be found that Jill nailed her two trapeze swings. Except she says she messed up her pose on one of them. Hopefully she'll explain this in a future blog entry using video footage that actually was recorded. Jill, if you can't find the footage then I'll whip up some stick figure diagrams of your performance.