Camera Battles

I’ve been very frustrated lately trying to get a clear picture of my knitting projects to post… well, that and getting a shot of my cat Sheldon that doesn’t look like a moving blur, as he seems to think the sight of the camera being aimed at him is an invitation to immediately hop in my lap and lick my nose.

So, I finally bit the bullet, raided this month’s grocery budget, and went hunting a new electronic camera to replace my old, barely functional piece of cheap junk. I found a good deal on an Olympus FE-20 with a useful macro function and stabilizer right before Polaris Con this past week-end, and so promised myself lots of nice pics of this year’s Masquerade costumes. I also frantically designed and knit up a fuzzy camera case for my purse since the salesperson told me modern cameras are extremely fragile and shouldn’t be kept loose with all the usual crap in a big, full handbag.

I tend to joke that Murphy of Murphy’s Law is stalking me, because, if anything can go wrong around me, it will. It certainly did when it came to the new camera.

To start with, I read the first part of the camera instructions while knitting the camera case, which I finished assembling about two hours before heading out the door to the con. Reading the rest of the instructions during the first panel of the day on Saturday, I discovered an instruction that I personally think should have been at the very beginning of the booklet – you need to charge the battery for at least five hours before using the camera for the first time, even if the camera was shipped with a partially charged battery. Well, at least I had been smart enough to bring the charger with me. What I hadn’t been smart enough to do was distinguish between the electric cable and TV connection cable. [Sigh.] So, no lovely Masquerade or TV star pictures this year.

Once home, I located the proper cable for the battery charger, figured out how to pry the battery out of its wedged-in death-hold on the camera, and gave it a full charge. Then I took several pictures of a couple of my knitting projects while trying to make the pamphlet’s user instructions make sense. I even chased Sheldon around the apartment and got a couple of shots that weren’t blurs or half a cat face and a tongue licking the camera lens. All that was left was to download the pictures to the computer where I could see them full size and determine if they were acceptable quality. This should have been simple, because according to the pamphlet, all I had to do was plug in the furnished USB cable and the camera would turn on and the computer would see it as an external drive. Everything seems to connect properly, but the camera does not turn on… and there’s absolutely nothing in the trouble-shooting directions of what to do if that happens. [Double sigh.]

So, tomorrow I call the Help Desk. Hopefully they will have an answer and I can start downloading. I’ve got lots of on-going knitting projects that I want to upload to this blog once I get them on my computer. I can’t wait to show you what I’ve been working on lately… well, besides trying to get the blasted camera to work!