Starry Starry Night

We went to the Cape this past weekend for, what we hope, is becoming an annual event. March on the Cape is dead, dead, dead. Which is totally fantastic. We rent a house in the middle of a beach front rental community. There's almost nobody there. The world has just gone away.

I've also been doing some major futzing with Tine's new camera, a Canon A590. This thing is awesome, tons of little features. I've been taking photos for awhile using various aperture settings to avoid flash photography, but my new thing is shutter speed.

Last year, there was a full moon at night. And that was beautiful in its own right, but this time, the moon was absent, and the expanded sky over the ocean was just alive with stars. I took about a dozen pics that night, using the slowest shutter speed (15") but this is one of the best I got that night.



Unfortunately, while I was trying to film the sunset, the camera and I had a bad falling out.

I had it precariously balanced on the railing of the deck to capture the sunset in real time. Stupidly, I took a couple of walks across the deck (so I could be in frame) and the subtle vibrations must have been just enough to set entropy in motion.

After about 3 minutes, I started to hear a small, intermittent, squeaking sound. As I stood, waiting for the sun to finish setting, it started to get less intermittent.

In extraordinaryly slow motion, I saw the camera shift and my hands shot out to catch it. I figure I would have actually done if the camera hadn't actually fallen at that precise nanosecond. Instead, the camera came down and connected with the tips of upwardly moving fingers. This caused the camera to bounce up even farther actually vaulting higher than the railing. It spun awkwardly in the air, the tiny tripod giving it an askewed center-of-gravity. My left arm shot out to try and catch it.

I actually remember my mind flashing: There's still a chance to save it!

But I overcompensated. It was like a beachball at a concert. Instead of catching the camera, I smacked it and sent it flying. It crashed into the barbeque grill and then fell onto the hard, stone patio. I grabbed it quickly, and in my haste to flip it on and off (I completely deleted the last 8 minutes of sunset). But it still appears to work. The latch for the battery compartment is slighly bent. It closes, but it's not flush anymore. There's about a 1/16" gap now and a nasty abrasion across that corner.

Between that and how much I hog the camera, Tine thinks she deserves a new one.

She's probably right.

bop to the top

0 comments 0 Comments: