The problem with having a good digital SLR camera is that sometimes it needs some TLC. Take mine–it’s a Nikon D300 and had a little dust-spec problem I was tired of trying to crop out of photos, and it needed a new rubber cover to replace the one that should be covering the input/output ports but instead was just flapping around on tiny hinges. With a trip to the Amazon planned a couple of months from now, I wanted to make sure I sent the camera off for its TLC in plenty of time for our big trip. So, two and a half weeks ago I sent my camera off to Nikon. I hadn’t heard from Nikon, so two days ago I called them and learned it will be another week before the new rubber cover comes in. They are THE Nikon repair place listed on Nikon’s official web site and they didn’t have a rubber cover in stock??!!
But surely I’m over-reacting, because surely, my old Nikon D100 could fill in for anything exciting that might happen while the D300 was in the shop. And surely nothing exciting would happen in my backyard during the weeks my D300 was away. Surely, I wouldn’t look out my bay window yesterday and see two deer near the lake hiding behind our brush pile, pine trees and tall native grasses, and surely what we first thought looked like a doe and a fawn wouldn’t turn out instead to be a doe and a buck whose antlers blended into the brush pile. And surely the doe wouldn’t come out from behind the vegetation into the open, flick up her white tail and wiggle just so. And surely the buck wouldn’t emerge to reveal his 8-point rack and sniff and mount her. Right in our backyard.
I, of course, was clicking away with my Nikon D100, but when I went to download the photos later, only one photo was captured. It’s the one below, which I took when I realized the buck and doe were leaving our property, and ran next door to shoot photos from behind my neighbor’s trees.
I don’t know why my old camera didn’t capture the other photos I took. Perhaps in my attempt to snap so many photos, I overwhelmed the old camera somehow. Perhaps the memory card is so new in comparison to the camera, the camera couldn’t translate the information correctly. Perhaps the deer cast aspersions against me for intruding on their private moment. Whatever the reason, it was bad timing on my part to send my D300 off for some TLC. Of course, if I only had bad luck, I would have no buck at all.