I figured out what caused my camera to malfunction at Saturday's fire. It wasn't the rain; it was an all-too-close lightning strike.
Early during the 45-minute, rain-sodden photo shoot, I lost the use of the LCD screen on my Nikon dSLR. I continued shooting, but thought some other things were funny. Hours after the fire, the LCD came back, but today when I went on a photo shoot, I had extremely intermittent usage of autofocus. I switched to manual focus, but was concerned about the continued problems.
After an afternoon meeting, I sat down with the camera to figure out what was going on. I searched the web fruitlessly, cleaned connection points, and so forth -- all to no avail.
Since I was desparate, I took out the camera manual and turned to the troubleshooting section. Nothing there was helpful, either. However, the next page somehow caught my eye.
At the top, I saw "A note on electronically-controlled cameras." Reading on, I caught a glimmer of hope.
In extremely rare instances, unusual characters may appear in the control panel and the camera may stop functioning. In most cases this
phenomenon is caused by a strong external static charge...
At some point during the fire, a tremendous clap of thunder rumbled through the mountainside scene. (I couldn't tell you when it happened since I was so focused on making pictures.) I saw no flash at the time, but the bang resonated so loud that I remember looking to see if the house was still intact.
After that second sentence in the manual about the external static charge, I knew that the lightning strike--however close it was--had caused the problem. I'm amazed that the camera continued taking and saving images after that.
To fix the problem, all I had to do was read and try the primary solution (which I'd already done without success) and the secondary solution. With a small-pointed utensil, I pressed a reset button that I'd never known existed under a panel on my camera, and I was back in business once I set the camera's date and time.
Suffice it to say the lightning strike was a little too close for comfort. At least my camera knew it.
Posted by JRC at August 11, 2005 12:11 AM | TrackBack