Home again

You can see for yourself, right here on this blog. On May 12, 2006, I bought a Canon Powershot S80. If I remember correctly, it cost me in the neighbourhood of just shy of $600. It was a marvel at the time and to me, it still is.

Not quite two years later, early in January of 2008, I bought a second-hand Powershot G9. Partly to defray the cost, I sold that S80 to P-Doug for (again, IIRC) $200 on January 26.

Yesterday, as a kindness, he gave it back to me.

It seems strange to say, given I owned it for only 20 months, that it's "home" again. After all, P-Doug owned it for nearly exactly ten years (!), six times longer than it was mine. But I genuinely loved that little S80 and I lamented selling it even before I handed it to him. It was a perfect handful. It took wonderful photos of nearly everything under the sun across two blazing summers, countless little incidental things at work and out and around town, and was literally attached to my hip for almost two years. I counted up once, and I took an incredible 32,000+ photos with this camera during the time I had it. It looks, if the file count is accurate, that took another 5,000 or so. So this camera's probably taken between 35,000-37,000 photos and videos across almost 12 years, and seems to be in pretty much the same shape it was the day I got it, less a paint scrape and screen blemish or two.

I'm going to make a point of carrying it around for a couple of days, at least. We're both a lot older than when we met. A lot's happened to us both since then. I don't know how much work I'll put it to, in all honesty, given the power and convenience of my cell phone, but I have a few hobby ideas (pairing it with my infrared reconned S80 to take matching simultaneous shots, for instance). But if nothing else, I can hold an important part of my life in my hand again and relive all the special moments it gave me and preserved for me.

Below: first picture I ever took with the S80, after getting in the car immediately after buying it at the Pacific Mall...

And, below, the last; a "self-portrait" of the camera, taken in the bathroom of my old apartment, just before boxing the thing up in its original packaging to sell to P-Doug that evening.