First photo on a junk camera

This is the first picture I took with my Fuji Finepix S3100 when I got it on March 13, 2005.  I bought the camera on a lark from a sale on Amazon, specifically to take on my second trip to Hawaii. It was my second digital camera, after having an Olympus for about four years.  It was a 4MP and was “SLR-inspired”, meaning the front lens stuck out a bit and it was impossible to put in a pocket easily.  It took some decent pictures, but also suffered in low-light.  I took 4329 pictures with it over the next two and a half years, but shortly after taking pictures at a Rockies-Giants game on 9/3/07, it completely died, and made a horrible glass rattling sound inside, so something was definitely wrong with it.

Some random things about this picture, in no particular order:

• It’s at my job in New York, and it’s at the job I recently re-started, so it’s weird to see my old desk again.
• I bought those noise-cancelling headphones at Tower, which is now gone.  They never really worked – I hoped I could wear them at night in my apartment to drown out the sound of the Jersey Shore-wannabe douches that always hung out on the sidewalks in Astoria, but they don’t really work like that.
• It’s strange to see the non-diet Coke cans on my desk.  They used to be a constant, but now that I only drink diet, the red cans seem alien to me.
• There’s some Arizona and Snapple bottles.  We used to always get lunch at Han’s Deli across the street, and I’d always get something like that to drink.
• There are a couple of horror movie action figures, also from Tower, sitting under the monitor.  I see the Freddy Krueger in particular.
• I switched to a flatscreen by that point at work.  I started with a huge CRT that did not seem huge at the time.  There’s actually an ancient CRT monitor sitting in my new cube in Palo Alto that I use when I’m there, and it’s astounding how colossal those things seem now that everyone uses LED for everything.
• I can’t be 100% sure, but it looks like Outlook is running on my screen.
• On the cube wall, I see a cheatsheet of Framemaker keystrokes, and a printed copy of a style guide I wrote.
• I also see part of a red “remove before flight” tag pinned to the wall.
• We got those translucents blue calculator for free as leftovers from some trade show.  They had this cover over them, where you clicked a button and it swung open like a Star Trek communicator, but the spring broke and it would take 39 seconds to open, so I tore off the cover.
• I don’t even remember that analog clock or where I got it; I don’t think I have it anymore.  I used to have this cool digital one that had a calendar and the time on it, also trade show swag, but the battery died and I think I threw it out.
• That grey cup in the foreground is an IU cup that I had in Seattle that followed me and is now here in my kitchen.  The IU logo is entirely worn off of it now.
• The “45” thing was a tag on an Ogio bag, which I used as a coaster.
• The picture in the frame is from a helicopter ride at Lake Mead, just outside of Vegas.

Here’s the last picture I took with the camera.  What I remember about it:

• I think I went to this game on a whim, and I went by myself.
• I got seats in left field, just because I never sat there.  They were cheap, but not that ideal – you really can’t see much of the action.
• I wanted to make an asterisk sign for Barry Bonds, but I didn’t get around to it.  He didn’t play that day, I think because it was a lefty on lefty situation.
• There was this crazy dude sitting next to me who had season tickets and was a die-hard fan who spent the whole game yelling and heckling every single player.

So that’s the life and the death of a camera.  It’s been Canon all the way since then, two point/shoots and a DSLR, with no regrets.