I was shooting the Meeker-Harrah football game Thursday night.
Midway through the first quarter, I focused onMeekerquarterback TreyvonComptonrolling out for a pass, pressed the shutter button and...
Nothing. At all. The old reliable Nikon D500 in my hands didn’t do a dern thing.
That has happened before when the battery ran down, so I put in a fresh one. Still nothing.
I fidgeted with it a while and finally pulled out the SD card and reseated it.
Voila! The camera was alive again and I finished shooting the game.
That was the second time in a month the camera hadn’t worked because of something minor. It has been a workhorse of a machine, but I had to wonder: Is it time to get a new one or maybe a backup?
There is a website where you can check how many photos a digital camera has taken. Upload the last photo you took with it, and the site will read the data and tell you what number it was.
So I uploaded the last photo from the Meeker game and a couple of seconds later, the web site popped up the number 223,492.
Dang. Almost a quarter of a million photos, with almost all of them from ballgames and sports events involving Lincoln County and Pott County teams.
Aquick investigative search showed the D500 is rated for 200,000 photos.
That means I am already well into the bonus round on this camera, which I bought during the football season of 2019.
I like the D500 a lot. There are faster cameras with more megapixels and faster focusing, but the D500 does everything I need it to and it fits my budget.
Only problem is Nikon quit making them two and a half years ago, along with many of their other DSLR models, as a result of so many people going to mirrorless cameras.
I long ago leveled up from the phase where I need the shiniest, newest toy and I have a lot of DSLR lenses I don’t want to have to replace, so I think I’ll stick with what I know works me. I’m old-school that way.
New D500s are as rare as Sasquatches these days, but I found one at B&H Photo in New York. It’s a gray market model, which means it has a store warranty instead of a Nikon, but hey.
It was priced right, as they say, and if I get a quarter of a million shots with it, like the old one, I’ll be pushing 77 years old and probably will be at the age where I shouldn’t be dodging flying linebackers any more So, I pulled the trigger and bought it. Delivery was set for Wednesday afternoon, easily in time to pack it to Clinton Friday night.