The Day My Camera Died

nature minus photography is still nature!

Sometimes, life lets you know that it’s time to shift gears. You’re entering a new era. Make some changes. Adjust. Step into the current and go with the flow.

One morning, as we prepared for a maple sap run, an unfamiliar song was in the air. And the still-bare branches of an apple tree were full of fluttering activity. We grabbed the binoculars and, to my delight, we were looking at a flock of busy, busy Evening Grosbeaks!

Evening Grosbeaks live in Maine year-round, but for some reason, we only see them on our property at this very earliest hint of spring. They forage through last year’s apples and scour seeds from beneath the feeders. The first time I saw them, I was mesmerized.

They’re so unusual. The males are so flashy. The females have such understated elegance.

They forage in large groups like goldfinches, crowding together and chattering amiably.

And there’s a dreamlike quality for us, too, because they’re only here for a few short days, and then they melt into distance and memory. I took all of these photos in 2020, and have never had more than a fleeting glimpse of an Evening Grosbeak since, though I hope for them every year.

And this year, here they were! I was absolutely prepared to loiter in the apple orchard with my camera all day long and add to my collection of Evening Grosbeak portraits.

But as I took my very first image, to fine-tune my settings, I knew something was wrong. After some fiddling and turning-off-and-back-on and battery-swapping, I had to acknowledge the truth. At long last, my camera’s sensor had worn out. My camera had died.

This camera has lived a phenomenal life, really. It’s got a lot of miles on it. I’ve learned a lot from it, and it has gifted me deep archives of precious memories dating back over 10 years.

We invested in our Nikon DSLR when we prepared to leave Kansas on our cross-country adventure to relocate to Bellingham, WA. Our kids were 1, 4 and 6, and we were going to be camping in national parks for an entire month as we made our slow way northwest across the country.

I am a slow adopter of tech. I had a little point-and-shoot Olympus. My husband was the bearer of the Nikon. I would take tons of macros and he would shoot the landscape, with occasional hey-can-you-get-that nudgings from me. I was like a back-seat photographer, like can you zoom in a bit more, what if you take it from a lower angle, can you line that up in the background? 🤣

I eventually adopted the “big camera” once we got settled in Maine, where I discovered that I could use the telephoto lens to capture nature portraits with gorgeous soft backgrounds. The camera became my constant companion outside, ever slung cross-body and resting on my hip, ready for every little thing that caught my eye and gave me pause.

Carrying a camera taught me to look at my world a little differently. Sure, I experienced the occasional “missed-shot” pressure. But mostly, I just started constantly scanning and framing my surroundings. Things I may have otherwise hiked right past and overlooked were constantly being prompted to my attention by my camera-brain. “Wait, that’s cool. Did you see that? That’s a nice angle. Great light.” And now this habit is ingrained in me, camera or not. Can’t help but feel grateful for that.

In a way, I found it very fitting to say goodbye to my DSLR in the company of these beautiful birds who are also one of my favorite photo memories. So I just stood with my binoculars, sans camera, soaking up the view of a happy flock of grosbeaks nibbling marcescent apples and chattering amongst themselves, until they took sudden flight and whirled away en masse into the low-hanging skies.

There’s always a touch of sorrow at the end of an era. But sometimes, also a sense of peace that the time is right. For now, I will brush up on some iPhone photography techniques, and spend some much-needed time revisiting, organizing, and processing my archives. Someday, a mirrorless camera will hopefully weave its way into my story, but that day is beyond a distant horizon for the moment.

Still, the archives are deep. And nature memories age like fine wine. So I expect the Nature Moments will keep coming, just possibly from a slightly more nostalgic direction for a while!

One of the earliest photos from our DSLR, a photo that my husband took of a thermal pool at Yellowstone National Park in 2013.

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