State of the Union.

In July of 2016 I parted company with $2491.19 of my hard earned money in exchange for a Nikon D750. Nikon owned my soul because I had bought a not small collection of Nikkor and Nikon compatible lenses for my D700. In June of 2016 the command dial of my D700 had stopped working. This made it hard to change shutter speeds in manual mode and thus hard to take photographs. I bought a first release issue of the D700 in July of 2008 meaning it provided me with 8 years of uninterrupted and dedicated service. I think 60k exposures or so? Whatever. The controls shouldn't have worn out when they did, but they did. 8 years isn't long enough a service life, never mind the less than 3 years the D750 has given me. But as the D700 stopped working I was left with a bag full of Nikon lenses and no Nikon, so off to the store to buy a good but not necessarily top shelf Nikon camera body, a D750.

Today the D750 shutter doesn't work. For a while now the first shot of the day resulted in an ERR message and a stuck shutter. It would work fine with the second and all subsequent shots, but the first shot was always a functional disappointment. As of yesterday the shutter has decided it no longer wanted to get out of the way of the sensor before any photograph was taken, leaving a dark band across the top of every photo I take. I guess $2491.19 doesn't buy what it used to. Nothing lasts forever, but $2491.19 should last longer than 3 years.

So the camera is now in a box somewhere between Vancouver and Mississauga where someone in a service center might fix the camera for me. It might cost me another $599 according to Nikon's web page.

In the mean time, a 50 year old Pentax Spotmatic will return to regular rotation. The Spotmatic wasn't cheap when new, but it wasn't expensive either, and 50 years later it's been in the shop only once for a light meter repair that cost $100.

I don't know if you can even buy a good camera anymore. And that's unfortunate. But I still have a good camera, no matter how obsolete it may appear.

Film photographs to come. Soon. ish.