I spent a couple of hours in High Park yesterday. I needed to ‘get out of the house, get some exercise, not look at a computer’ sort of thing. And, after all, it is spring, so I was curious as to what was happening in the city’s wilderness. The fellow had to be in the area, so I tagged along to wander a part of town I don’t spend much time in. Once I got to Grenadier Pond, I saw my subjects for the day: a pair of Wood Ducks! I had never seen a female before, so it was a particularly special sight for me.
The pair stayed close to the shoreline, going back and forth between a few areas of cattails for a while before deciding to head out further down the lake, so for a while, it was a perfect situation for someone with a camera. However, my baby, which had been working fine up to the previous day, suddenly developed a problem with autofocus. Woe was me — this camera isn’t very old and I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with Nikon support (I love Nikon cameras but my past experiences with support have been nightmares) … and a pair of Wood Ducks in front of me! The camera seemed to hit the focus point, then settle ahead of that point for a blurry image. I was able to grab some shots with autofocus, but had to move to manual focus to really be able to shoot with confidence.
Once the pair had moved down the shoreline, it was time to get serious about troubleshooting. I checked settings, even restoring defaults in case something had been inadvertently adjusted. This seemed to help for a short while, then the camera reverted back to the autofocus problem. Finally I noticed that the view through my viewfinder was a bit hazy. It was a bright day, so I hadn’t really noticed earlier — how apparent this was depended on where I pointed the camera. I took a look at my lens … and discovered the problem. Somehow, the lens had acquired some sort of clear goo, so the camera had been focusing according to where the focus point had been set at a given time: focus through clear area, normal behaviour; focus through gooey part, camera threw hissy fit, extent of said fit being determined by thickness of goo in given area through which the camera was told to determine focus. Clean lens, happy camera, happy photographer. The odd part was that I had been putting the lens cap on the lens, but I must have missed once. Checking my camera bag, sure enough, there is some sort of goo at the bottom of the bag. Near as I can figure, my recent trip to Las Vegas must have caused a piece of gum or candy that I keep on hand to help with ears popping during takeoffs and landings to melt in the heat.
Bottomline: before thinking that you are having mechanical difficulties, double-check that there isn’t some sort of user error or simple problem. In this instance, I lost a lot of really great photo opportunities, but lucked out with still being able to have taken a few shots I liked and my problem being nothing that a lens cloth couldn’t fix. Could have been a lot worse.
