Well, the day finally came. One of my cameras, a staple in my project for the last few years, finally just decided to die on me. It lost all zoom control, zooming the entire way out in the middle of a shot, and would not respond to LANC control. It would not respond to physical movement of the zoom lever! It would not respond… at all! Now, I’ve been forseeing this for some time - I’ve had shots during the last few days of 2004 where the camera would, you know, just decide to zoom all the way in… cool, huh? Not when a squirrel decides to do something as a back-shot on another camera and it’s sitting there looking at a blade of grass! Not only that, but one day during the summer of 2004, the camera turned on with an OSD overlay (on-screen display) that would NOT turn off… and this overlay was all garbage characters (imagine this going on for an entire day - if you de-interlace the picture, you’ll see one version of the screw-up, which means the video is not only unusable, but flickering too!) … Pseudo-Japanese text, blocks of text that showed 2 numbers on top of each other, etc… and that took 2 days to fix - not a good thing to use as a feed camera! And now it’s dead… totally dead. Well, I gave it a respectable burial (think of it as hazing, but the other way around), but that’s not after spending about an hour trying to fix it. The project day itself is a pretty good day! The squirrels find the food inside of the bag, almost all of it, and towards the end when the camera does die, you can see a shot of both angles, the good angle and and the angle caught by the bad camera at the same time! Note on that - the little window of the other camera was not resized at all - that’s the natural size of the video when it was zoomed out all the way. Yes, it sucks that much that the camera died… and that’s the only camera I used that had night shot! It will truly be missed…

Oh, and yes, that is muh somewhat fat #$% in the beginning… I’m, uh, working on that…

 

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