What a Difference a Smudge Makes

I've been extremely frustrated with my camera lately (as you may recall from the post about Brandon and Caleb's eyes). It's just a point and shoot type camera that I desperately wanted so that I could take it with me everywhere, as my normal camera is a big ol' bulky digital SLR. When I first got my "purse camera," I absolutely loved it. I was blown away by the quality of the images it produced. Sure, the response time is not as fast as my "good camera," but I was expecting that.

Then one day, the battery light started flashing. I noticed that the image quality radically dropped. I didn't think much of it, attributing it to the low battery. But even after I recharged the battery, the quality didn't improve. No matter what settings I changed on the camera, the pictures always turned out with this sort of film over them. It drove me nuts. To the point that I hated the camera and was about ready to take it into the shop to see if they could fix it.

Caleb and I had many great grand adventures today, of which I will post once I go through all the pictures. I'd hesitantly taken my purse camera with me. Sure, it's small and fits nicely in my pocket, but it seemed almost pointless lately to even use the thing, as crappy as it's been behaving.

I snapped a few photos of Caleb at the park, but as usual, was disappointed with the results. I turned the camera off, and in the process, tilted it up without even thinking. Something caught my eye. I turned it back on again. The lens zoomed back out and I stared at it, shocked. There was a layer of film on the lens. A smudge covering the majority of the lens. And it's a tiny lens too. About the size of...well, the size of Caleb's fingertip.

I used my shirt to clean it off. The results nearly took my breath away. Suddenly, after two months of misery, I love my little camera again! (Though I do feel rather stupid that this is what the problem was. Two months of crappy pictures that I could have fixed in one second if only I'd noticed it sooner. Sadness.)

The last picture I took before I noticed the smudge. Such a cute boy. It's heartbreaking that the image isn't better when he's so stinkin' cute.

The very next picture I took. Not Caleb's best pose, but I mostly wanted to see if really my broken camera was magically fixed. That's some good spit I've got!