Giving Up the Ghost

So yesterday I accompanied my church school to Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire. It is one of two national parks in the United States that is devoted to an artist and it is absolutely beautiful. A sculptor, Saint-Gaudens's most famous piece is the Robert Shaw Memorial, which stands across the street from the state house in Massachusetts, and commemorates the Massachusetts 54th regiment - the first all-black regiment to fight for the North during the Civil War (this is particularly intriguing to me at this time because I just read about the regiment in Goodwins's, Team of Rivals).

The weather was wonderful, the kids were well-behaved, and I was shooting away with my Canon Rebel 300D camera. I've had the camera since 2004, and though it a "dinosaur" in this technological age, it has served me well. While taking a picture of someone besides the Robert Shaw memorial, I looked down at my LCD monitor and saw blackness staring back at me. Confused about the problem, I took a few more pictures, only to see the same thing. When I pressed the playback mode, all that was recorded in those frames was nothing but black.

After a little bit of research and fiddling around with my camera today, I have realized that the inevitable has happened: it has given up the ghost. To be more specific, I guess a camera's shutter only has a certain shelf-life, and it appears as though my shutter has reached its limit. If I wanted to have the shutter repaired, it would cost me about $300 - which is not worth it at all at this point.

So I need a new camera and, truth be told, I have been wanting to buy a new one for a little while anyway - so this gives me a good excuse. It was about time to give up this fossil (ironically, just about ten minutes before the camera stopped working, I was telling one of the students that I wanted to get a new camera).

But the problem is, I wish I had known this would happen about two days before. Timing is everything, isn't it? Just one day prior to my camera's shutter giving up the ghost, we bought a new $300 point-and-shoot camera for Camille, and an $800 computer (both of which are being shipped to us as we speak)! Needless to say, I cannot afford a new camera right now, but I cannot afford not to have a camera as autumn approaches (and Camille's point-and-shoot just won't cut it for me)!

So I'm not sure what to do.

I guess I'll start a fund raising campaign on this Blog.