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This post is really about the old Scout motto – “Be Prepared”. I’m pretty happy with this shot, taken a few years ago during my first business trip to India, but if you take a look at the EXIF data, you’ll see it was taken with a Nikon Coolpix 4600 point-and-shoot. This was a $150 camera at the time (you can’t buy it now and, if you could, it would be given away with Corn Flakes). I originally bought it as an expendable camera prior to a slighty earlier trip to Guatemala where I was worried that carrying a DSLR would be inviting a mugging (which wasn’t true by the way) but it became an able backup and “keep in the car” camera after that and did a good job until I bought the Canon G9 and passed it on to someone else.

The odd thing about the fact this was shot on the 4600, though, is that I had lugged a backpack full of DSLR gear half way around the world with the express intent of using it to shoot the Taj Mahal. The Coolpix was thrown in at the last minute “just in case”.

At the time, I only had a single DSLR body, a Nikon D70, and, on the way down to Agra from New Delhi, we stopped on a dark road to grab some shots of the Lotus Temple. While trying to get back into the car, however, I fell in a hole (it was very dark) and smashed my D70 into the ground, killing the shutter release mechanism and turning my bag of lenses into just another dead weight.

Thank goodness for the point-and-shoot since it allowed me to record some of my memories of the Taj Mahal, albeit with lower dynamic range, in JPEG rather than RAW and without access to super-wide-angle views. The moral here is, regardless of how reliable your main camera is, always have something to fall back on, even if it’s a $100 point and shoot or a camera phone, since you never know when you’ll need it. I strongly suspect there’s a correlation between the amazingness of what you intend shooting and the likelihood that you’ll suffer a main camera problem, though 🙂

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