photographic ramblings
On Friday, Heather and I managed to pass the 13,000-exposure mark with our Canon A80. With 533 days of ownership, that's an average of 24.48 photos a day, every single day. A roll of film a day; I'm quite amazed by that.
Of course, it's not actually a roll of film every single day. Our shooting tends to be more in fits and starts. Events and activities are saturated with shots (hundreds at a time) and then the camera sits idle for a week or so.
After returning home from babysitting on Friday, I was unloading the car and managed to drop the camera bag onto the concrete garage floor. The camera sits sideways in the bag and so one of the sides took the brunt of the impact.
I was (and still am) very pissed off at myself for doing this. There is damage to the side and to the top panel of the camera. There may also be some minor damage to the flash. I've honestly been afraid to shoot any test shots with it for fear of finding out the worst: the lens or sensor is now misaligned. If that were the case, we would have to buy a new camera; something I'm really not able to do right now.
There's another, more technical, concern to buying a new camera: media.
It's pretty clear that CompactFlash is no longer acceptable in the consumer point and shoot market. Almost every single new digital point and shoot in the past 6 months has been released with SD instead of CF. (The expections to this are MediaStick [Sony] and xD [Olympus and Fuji] card cameras).
If we had to buy a new digital camera, in all likelyhood we would have to buy new media and a new media reader to replace the CF storage we currently have. When one is talking about a $300-400 camera, another $150 (at least) in storage is very significant. Not only would there have to be a 1:1 storage replacement, in all likelyhood it would need to be 2:1. Most new cameras are above 4MP and thus each image takes up more space.
Still, I know, I should be very thankful that I'm able to even think about being worried about such things. There are far more pressing and important problems affecting others in this world. I'm very blessed to be able to afford photography at all.