My Nikon camera met a bad fate this week. Last Tuesday morning, I did what I routinely do with cameras from the newspaper. I offloaded the video recording from the Mount Vernon City Council and got that ready for upload to our YouTube channel.
After, I was getting ready to move photos from my Nikon SD card to the computer so I could pick and choose the best photos I had from the Ocean Odyssey event, Alger’s last night at the Pizza Palace and a photo of the Boy Scout Troop 40 (as their 100th birthday as a troop is coming up and I’m starting work on that story now).
I inserted the SD card into my card reader for my laptop, and, well, it seemed to be having an off morning. It kept telling me to insert a card into the card reader. That’s happened on occasion, usually I just haven’t pushed the card all the way into the reader. I pulled it out and retried. Still telling me it had no memory card. Now, I’m confused. I know it showed photos last night when I was reviewing the Boy Scouts pictures.
So, I flipped the memory card over and did not see the metal reflection indicating the memory portion of the memory card…
That apparently got stuck in my camera.
What followed was pure panic and stupidity in trying to get the camera card out of the camera. I reinserted the plastic memory card, hoping it would realign with the metal innards.
That didn’t work. The SD card was then stuck entirely in my camera. In my continued panic, I failed to do the one thing I desperately should have done before I took any additional steps – remove the power source from the camera.
As I fought to extract the now stuck memory card, well, the plastic portion of the card did come back out. But the metal prongs that trapped it now were touching one another and the memory card that was forced deeper inside the camera. Anyone who works with electrical equipment knows metal touching other metal with an electric charge is bad, especially if they are not supposed to be touching.
Suffice to say, my Nikon, a camera I have used for almost a decade, is no longer working, and that memory card was still in the camera when electricity freely moved between. Compounding errors and panic are never a good combination.
The office has other cameras I can use, most of them Canon cameras. But that also means I’m going to have to retrain my brain on which direction to turn the lens to attach to a camera and even focus.
And it also means I lost a lot of photos still on that card. Luckily, I was able to find others for the shark event and Boy Scouts story. The Alger’s final day photos, however, are ones I completely lost in that equipment error.
Sunny Side: Arrivederci, Nikon D3200
June 15, 2023
About the Contributor
Nathan Countryman, Editor
Nathan Countryman is the Editor of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.