The death of a digital camera

Thursday, 29 December 2005

It is with great sadness to report, that at only 3 months old, my digital camera died the other day.

I was in the process of taking a photo of the family with whom I was celebrating Christmas, when the naughty little gadget fell out of my hand.

Now, I don't know why it is, but Mexican houses have never heard of carpets. There is the lesser-spotted rug every now and then, but I have not once seen the wall-to-wall variety in any home I have visited. All floors are hard-tiled in Mexico, like a kitchen. This was the case in the home I was taking the photo. As the camera slipped out of my hand, I saw it falling, as if in slow-motion, to the ground. My arms and legs moved frantically to prevent it's fall, but the camera craftily dodged everything I placed in its way. It obviously had a death wish. I watched helplessly as its hard metal body cracked against the solid tile floor.

I bent down to pick the poor thing up, and it was completely dead, not a spark of life in it. For a £230 camera, that was an expensive drop.

Well, I kept a cool face in front of my family, but inside I was ever so slightly gutted. The camera otherwise is an absolutely fantastic reporting tool, and I have hoped to take many photos, and tell many stories with it, so for me the camera is a highly important tool.

Fortunately, I took out an extended warranty on it's purchase to cover things like this, so I should not have to spend too much money to replace it. But I will still have a circus of a time posting it back to the UK, waiting for it to be fixed, and waiting for it to come back to Mexico.

For this reason, I don't have any photos of the Mexican Christmas to show, and the next few weeks will be a little 'blind' too, but I hope to be back up and running by late February. Please pray for a speedy and successful resolution to this problem, as in March I will be celebrating my birthday in Cuba - and I have to say - it would be pretty cool to take some photos of that. But more on Cuba in a later blog...

R.I.P. Canon Digital IXUS 40, long live your successor.

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