10,000

Kind of a slow day at work, getting caught up on some paper/computer work. I had to edit some images that I took for the district and was previewing them on my camera. My camera keeps track of the number of exposures that it has made and can display the number of them starting from the first and ending at the last.

It was while previewing the images that I noticed I was looking at the 10,007th image that my camera had taken. Sadly, I had already deleted the 10,000th, but it was taken 1.7 seconds before this one, #10,007 and was almost the same shot.

This helicopter was taking photos of the King of the Hammers event last week. As it had been parked on Means dry lake bed on the day before this photo was taken, I had spoken with the pilot (maybe the owner) who told me that this helicopter was a Bell UH-1B and was built in 1967. It had served with the Norwegian military and had performed primarily search and rescue duties.

For a ship of it's years, it has relatively few hours and has led a pretty good life. I am guessing many of it's sister ships spent their lives in southeast Asia, getting holes punched in their sides and bellies.

10,000 images in seven months. Of those, only 100 or so have been printed, less than half are worth saving. The shutter in my camera is supposed to last 100,000 images. At this rate, I will have to send it in for a re-build in May of 2016. That will probably cost me a few hundred bucks, if parts are available that is.

Of course by then, Canon will have the EOS 1D mark 6 out that will be 35 megapixel and will shoot 25 frames per second. I will have to look into one of  those and will discover that all of my existing lenses won't work and I will have to think about replacing those as well. See where this is going?

Still, 10,000 images is a significant number, especially when I realize that I am still as happy with this camera as the day I bought it Santa brought it.

Thanks for reading,
Schmoe