Death of a Camera

A few months ago, Lora decided she wanted a new digital camera. She's had a good camera - an Olympus C60 - which we've loved, used, and abused, and it's kept on going. In recent months, we've been trying to get the camera to do a bit more than it was meant to, wishing that it could do this a little better, or that it would do that, or had this different feature. (Lora was really interested in a camera with a better, longer, stronger, tele-photo lens.) As good as it was, we'd begun to outgrow our C60 point-and-shoot. We started looking around and found another Olympus, the SP560uz. It's substantially larger than the C60, with more features and an 18 power, wide angle zoom. Not quite the DSLR Kevin wanted (and nowhere near the $1700+ sans lens price tag), but close.

The plan was to buy this camera and have the C60 as our bullet-proof back-up. While the plan looked good in our heads, the reality of having two digital cameras was hard to justify at the moment, and we'd been putting the purchase off as it wasn't really a necessity.

Our C60 had different plans and decided to force our hand by giving up the ghost.

Trying to take a few pictures, the screen kept blacking out or showing us a bunch of jibberish numbers. When we'd try to turn it off, it wouldn't unless we pulled the battery out, and then, the lens wouldnt close. Bummer. The worst part was that it happened during the day that Amanda was at her Odyessy of the Mind Science Competition. We did get pics of the events but the camera died before the awards ceremony. Thankfully, there were friends there with cameras to get some pics for us.

We're unsure how long Lora would be able to live without a camera, if at all. (For anyone with questions about Lora's amount of picture taking, take a look at our SmugMug galleries. More than 28,000 photos to date!) Deciding that it was in the best interest of the family to keep Mom happy, combined with the fact that the next day was K&Ls anniversary and Kevin hadn't figured out what to get her, Lora got her new camera.

For those of you who regularly visit our SmugMug pages, you'll probably see some strange photos in the next few days & weeks while we learn all that this thing can do. Please be patient; they'll get better.