The Power of the Internet

It is easy to forget how different life is with the internet at our fingertips. I was out with my camera today and while I was sitting with it on my lap one of my kids jumped on me and knocked it on to the (concrete) ground. It only fell about 6 inches, but when I picked it up I could not get it to auto focus. I tried everything I could think of, I changed the lenses, took out the battery, looked through the menus, etc. Nothing worked.

10 years ago I would have had to take it into a dealer, or send it in for service. Today, I did one search on Google "Nikon d300 won't autofocus". The first link I selected was a post that suggested that I put the camera in Live View (LV) mode, and then switch back to normal. I did that (and took a few shots in LV mode), and switched back. Autofocus is back to working perfectly. It took 30 seconds to fix.

It is an odd solution, and one I would have never figured out on my own, but it worked great. I would have never found this in the age before the internet. This is basic stuff, but it is easy to take it for granted.