El Andalous - Problem Overhang

Sahl Hasheesh - Threadfin Butterflyfish

Of course, a new year is really just the continuation of your life; the boundary between the years is just arbitrary. And so, my problems from 2014 (not that I have many) are still here.

One such problem is my camera. You may recall that a new digital underwater camera was on the list of things I got from the UK last year. Well, it’s already broken. It was working very well, even though I abused it quite a bit by keeping it underwater too long and forgetting to clean it. However, one day it refused to take any more photos. It wouldn’t switch off and the shutter wouldn’t close. In retrospect, I think this may be because I washed it afterwards, as suggested, but then opened it too soon afterwards and some tiny bit of water got in because it wasn’t 100% dry.

Anyway, I was desperate for a new camera, so I bought a new one while Geraldine was here. By some miracle, I found one in the Kodak shop on Sheraton Road (although it’s a Polaroid camera). It cost around 110 GBP instead of maybe 70 GBP that I’d pay on amazon, but since I didn’t think they had any here at all, I was actually pretty pleased.

Getting a new camera means learning how to use it, which is always a bit tiresome, particularly when you’re not so good at reading instructions.

First of all, I couldn’t work out how to put the batteries in. They made a big fuss about making sure they were inserted correctly, but I couldn’t find anywhere telling me which way they should go in.

I put the batteries in, but I got it wrong, and then found out that I couldn’t work out how to open the battery compartment. We finally worked out that you had to push a sliding clip towards the back of the camera while pushing the compartment to the right. However, this seems to work on a temperamental basis and sometimes it takes me several days until it will just suddenly decide to open.

I got the right order of the batteries in the end, but then I couldn’t work out how to take a photo. It turned out that the button I was pressing thinking it was the shutter was in actual fact a thing which meant that your viewing screen was the front of the camera and not the back. It wasn’t until I tried to take a photograph with Geraldine watching me and she pointed out that she could see the screen that I realised what was happening.

Anyway, on a few occasions now, my blog has been posted later than I wanted purely because I’ve been struggling to open my camera (my memory card is stored where the batteries are, so if I want to download my photos, I need to tackle that pesky battery compartment).

I keep on thinking I’ll take the camera back as the battery compartment is so difficult (I wonder if it’s malfunctioning), but each time it opens, I end up forgiving it.