New Camera Day

It was just over 11 years ago. June of 2015. We had tickets to two Rush concerts. One at TD Garden in Boston and the other at Madison Square Garden in New York. I wanted to bring a pocket sized point and shoot camera into the two arenas so I bought a little Nikon Coolpix S7000 at Best Buy. 16 megapixels, a 20x zoom. Good stuff. 

I took about a couple hundred pics at the two shows and was really happy with some of the results. For example:

Over the years, I used the shit out of that camera. It went with me pretty much everywhere. I made a conscious decision somewhere along the way to use the S7000 instead of my iPhone and from that moment on I took a zillion pics with it. Then it broke. Shit. The lens cover wouldn’t open all the way, and it wouldn’t close at all. It just died. Boom. Dead. Sadness.

In September of 2025 I went to eBay and bought another one. A replacement. I was so happy to have my stupid little pocket camera back. Unfortunately it was a lemon. Every single photo it took was blurry. All of them. I would crank up the ISO in the hopes of it using the fastest shutter speeds possible but it didn’t matter. Everything was blurry. Sadness again.

Now here we are in July of 2026 and I have tickets to see Rush at Madison Square Garden (the show is less than two weeks away! SQUEEEE!!) and damn it, I want to bring a pocket sized camera into the show again. I want more of those pictures. This time there will be a keyboard player and a different drummer, but otherwise I want more of the same.

Fuck it. Back to eBay I go. I bought another one. If this third camera is also a lemon then I will give up and just use my iPhone like a normal person in 2026. The seller was in New Hampshire so the shipping was nice and fast. It was delivered today. The battery was charged. I threw the memory card that was in the second camera (that I am pretty sure started life in the first camera) and did a lap around the house snapping anything.

Is it a lemon?

Nope. It looks good!

Success (he said knowing a million things could still go wrong between now and the Rush show, but give me a break. I want to be happy for a change. Let me have this one, m’kay?)!

Here’s hoping this little sucker lasts me for about 10 years the way the first one did. Fingers crossed