I managed to trash my trusty point&shoot camera tonight. It’s an ancient Canon SD300 that I think I bought in like 2003/2004. And I started using it for food photos on July 18th, 2007.

Apparently it doesn’t like to be dropped.

In the case that anyone here is camera savvy enough to tell me if it can be fixed, here’s what’s happening.

First, shooting video is still fine, so at least the camera’s not a complete throwaway item. However, the still photos are completely jacked (and of course, I used the camera 99% of the time to take still photos of the food, so this sucks):

• it overexposes everything. I’m guessing whatever senses the ambient light is basically broken.
• it leaves lines on photos. If I were smart, I’d have a sample photo available of this. But I don’t. I’m guessing this indicates that the CMOS sensor or whatnot is kaputt, because it looks fine on the LCD, before I actually take the photo.

So in summary: #$%^ !

I don’t have the money to replace the camera, so my backups are my ancient DSLR (not very portable and don’t own a case for it) and my iPhone.

Currently, I’m thinking my iPhone wins out since I’m carrying it with me everywhere anyway.

I have concerns though. Such as:

• it geotags everything. I know it can be disabled.. somewhere, but the problem with that is that I do want some stuff geotagged. Flickr would be the destination for the public photos, so I guess I’m gonna have to do some digging to find out how to either 1) strip the location data 2) prevent it from being accessed.

• if I can drop a camera, ya know, a piece of equipment designed to easily held and used for taking pictures, the likelihood that I’ll drop my iPhone when taking a picture… oh about 1000 times more likely.

So again: #$%^ !