Well, Guatemala has a tendency to cause all kinds of electronics to function sporadically or inconsistently, or just stop functioning altogether. Whether it’s a computer, phone, camera, electric razor, pretty much everything is effected. I think the combination of dust, humidity and altitude just wreak havoc on the circuitry and mechanics of things.

My camera gear has been no different. My battery charger still functions, but no longer recognizes that there isn’t a battery plugged into it, and continues to try charging after the fully charged battery has been removed. My flash ceased functioning within 3 days of getting here, and now occasionally works, but the LCD screen doesn’t always, even when the rest of the flash is, and I’ve lost most of the controls on the control panel. thankfully, some of the time, it still communicates properly with the camera and TTL works, but that’s only some of the time. My nice tele-zoom has pretty much locked up in the fully zoomed position, and refuses to budge to zoom back to it’s shorter focal lengths.

But probably the oddest thing that’s happened has been the fact that my my 60mm AF micro Nikkor lense has suddenly started to work properly. I’ve always used it as a manual focus lens, it was that way when I bought it 5 years ago, and it never worked in Auto Focus mode. Now the Auto focus works. go figure. Not that I’m complaining mind you, when I bought the lens I got an amazing deal on it because the AF didn’t work, I picked it up in a box of stuff along with a sunpak 622 pro, an AIS 55mm Micro nikkor, and a bunch of other stuff that a company that was switching to digital didn’t think they could use anymore. I paid the whopping sum of $25 for the whole box. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of the sunpak, though I did buy a IR head for it to go with my D1R Infrared camera, and have used it pretty much exclusively with that. And I’ve used the Micro-nikkors for several projects as well. That’s the kind of deal I’d love to stumble into once a year, sadly I haven’t found anything close in quite a while, though I did pick up a nikkor 55 mm F1.8 AF-D lens at a thrift shop for $10 the day before leaving to come down here. Sadly it stopped working upon my arrival here as well…