Death of a Camera

I went to the Columbus Zoo October 9th, carrying both the Nikon D50 and Kodak Z1012. The Kodak takes fine pictures, but the Nikon SLR, which is older (~2006 vs. 2008), is a pleasure to use. The viewfinder is bright; manual zoom is easy; autofocus is fast; the shutter delay is brief; and the camera is quickly ready to take another picture. The Kodak is smaller and lighter; has twice as many pixels; and has a longer zoom, but the motorized zoom control is placed awkwardly on the back of the camera and it seems as though a minute passes before it's ready to take another shot.

I sometimes carry both cameras because of the Nikon's ease of use and the Kodak's ability to seemingly capture more detail.

Anyway, my first stop was the barn and goat yard. I took a couple of pictures with the Nikon, looked at them, and was surprised that they were all black. Lens cap on? No, there isn't one. A leftover manual setting from a previous trip? Hmm. I made sure the camera was set to automatic and took more shots, with the same result. Battery? I knew it was getting low, but it wasn't dead. Still, I decided the battery was the cause of the all-black images and put the Nikon back in the bag.

Here are some shots from that day:

Merten's water monitor

hadada ibis

Amur tiger

Asian elephant

At home I charged the battery and took a trip to the zoo the next week. The same thing happened, which was not good. What had I done? I fiddled around to no avail and pulled out the Kodak. I took two pictures before the camera shut down. I was ready for that and had a second battery... but I'd left it in the car. I called the trip a complete bust and went home.

I searched the Internet for causes of black pictures and followed some diagnostic steps. I concluded that the shutter works but the light/image sensor does not. What next?

The Nikon is not my camera; it's by brother-in-law's. He loaned it to me earlier this year as I was deciding how to replace the Kodak, which has failing buttons and controls. I had settled on a Canon in the same "advanced point-and-shoot" category as the Kodak when my brother-in-law told me the Nikon was mine as a long-term loan. Wow!

I had been secretly wishing for a better SLR, one with more pixels and better low-light performance, but SLRs cost a lot. (My reading tells me a camera's megapixels is less important than the size of the image sensor, but the D50 has only 6 megapixels vs. 12 for the Kodak.) Now that the D50 didn't work, I had an excuse to replace it with something better! My Internet searching for causes of black images also pointed me to the possibility of buying a used SLR, and that's what I did. My Nikon D7000, first produced in 2010, arrived this week, and I told my brother-in-law that I upgraded his camera.