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Saturday 31 October 2009

Halloween haunted camera

fairy ring Fairy ring

Yesterday, I was helping out at Durham County Council’s annual halloween event at Hardwick park at Sedgefield.

During the day, we put up marquees and tents and signs and temporary fences and all kinds of things like that, and during the event, my job was to be at the end of the grown-ups’ scary walk, making sure that people didn’t enter the exit, basically, and call for counsellors and emergency cpsychiatric help for those who were emotionally damaged by being screamed at and chased by scary ghosts and young ladies with their mouths sewn up.

All good clean fun. There was also a rock band (monster mash and timewarp inevitably…), a fire juggler, circus skills, spiders web, torture chamber, little horrors scary walk, crafts, dancers, stilt walkers and a very friendly blood-stained “doctor” as well as various monsters, ghoulies and strangely odd people…

1200 people bought tickets…

But my camera became bewitched or something and I couldn’t see anything on the screen at all except something that looked vaguely like a bar code. I took a couple of hopeful snaps and downloaded them successfully and present them here for your edification and delight.

One shows a ranger up a tree about to hang a witch (not a real one, obviously) and the other is a very nice fairy ring of mushrooms, slightly off-centre as I couldn’t see anything on the screen, see?

hang the witchRangers up a tree

Unless there are any suggestions about what I can do with this duff camera (nothing physically demanding, please, I’m an old chap…) – it seems I’ll have to buy a new one.

Bugger.

Incidentally, this is a big event for the Council and most, if not all of it’s Countryside team is enlisted to help – and they do work pretty hard at this – there is also a big coterie of volunteer countryside rangers, like wot I am who do it for the free curry and because we just like to be helpful. And its a laugh, quite frankly.

5 comments:

Michael said...

Mike, It would be worth trying the bare battery reset trick on it. If you remove the battery and look for a reset button.

Some cameras have a little lithium CR220 or something like that, you may need to remove that too. Basically, you want it to start from scratch so you will have to re-enter date etc.

What sort of camera is it? Google may find other owners with similar problems.

Regards, Michael

Mike Knipe said...

Thanks Michael - I removed the batterries for a while, then looked up the reset function on the manual, and, its a menu option - can't find a button.
So, I pretended that I could see the screen and followed what would be on the menu if I could see it.
This doesnt appear to have worked, but, apparently, taking the baterries out and leaving the camera for 3 days also resets it.
So, I'm trying that.
It seems to work - ie it takes pictures, but I just cant see the screen.
Failing all this, I'll take it to a caamera shop and , probably come out with a new one. I'll have 3 dead ones, then (previous got run over by a car!)

Mike Knipe said...

Incidentally, its an Olympus X720... I'll try the googling suggestion in a bit.

Gayle said...

Well, if cameras dying comes in threes, then I've got the other two. The Olympus died a month or so ago, when the autofocus ceased to focus. After much whirring it would come up with an empty blue screen. Empty blue screens are rarely good.

So, for this weekend I switched to a rather chunkier model that I inherited. Dicky battery indicator it seems: it's often convinced that the brand new lithium batteries are dead (but other times quite happy that they're not).

I just pressed the 'buy' button for a different make and model. Fingers crossed.

Mike Knipe said...

Thanks for that Gayle! It seems these caameras are disposable after all..
After surfing this ere interwebby thing, I've come to the conclusion that the camera's led screen is broken. Apparently, a replacement screen costs $32, thats about seventy quid once you get to Durham.
Probably buy another disposable camera.
Interestingly, it still takes pictures, but there's a little blue mpixie in the bottom left hand corenr of the scree with a blue hat and two little eyes, and he's gradually getting bigger...