The Magic Touch
On doing irrational things on principle.
Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. -Teller
I have this camera. It's a Canon 7D. Released in 2009, the 7D was marketed as a semi-professional DSLR camera with an 18-megapixel sensor and Full HD (1080p) video capabilities. I bought mine in 2011 and mostly used it to shoot home movies. Today, 12 years and 9 months later, it obediently sits on a tripod all day broadcasting my face across the internet for Zoom calls. There's a hint of overkill that surrounds the idea of asking a $1699 camera to do a job a $25 webcam from Amazon can do. But I didn't buy it for this. For years it's been sitting in my camera case in suspended animation. I'd stopped shooting home movies and my iPhone is good enough for the vacation pictures I'll never look at again, so by utilizing my fancypants DLSR as a webcam, I turned something I wasn't using into something I was. But there's a catch.
It's old, by technology standards. So getting it to play nice as a webcam, a purpose for which it was not designed, takes some modifications and a deft touch.
The modifications seem straightforward: buy an AC adapter so it doesn't have to run on a battery and set the Auto-Off function to "Off" in the camera settings. Well...
After some number of minutes, the camera turns off anyway. The maximum setting in the menu is 30 minutes, which is too short for most meetings. A customary browse of the internet reveals others with this same problem, but no useful solution materializes. Dead in the water already. Here's where my brain goes next: "It's supposed to work. So it must work. Let's see how exact this Auto Off thing is." A test is needed. The smallest thing first. Let's set it for 1 minute and see if it actually shuts itself off. A minute passes. Then two minutes. Then five. While it runs in the background, I keep working and forget about it. When I recheck it in an hour, my face still stares back at me in my Zoom call.
It works when Auto-Off is set to 1 minute. This makes no sense, but I don't question these things. This is a technological "gift horse".
The next hurdle is actually the first hurdle - getting my mug to stare back at me in the first place. There's a camera, a computer, and a USB cable. On the camera, there is a USB port into which one side of the cable plugs. On the computer, the same. A reasonable person would assume once both ends are plugged in and the camera is turned ON (don't forget that part), their face would appear on the screen in their video meeting software of choice. I always begin as a reasonable person. When this doesn't happen, however, a random sequence of activities commences as part of a troubleshooting algorithm I've unconsciously honed over the decades. Turn it off and back on. Wait. Unplug it and plug it back in. Wait. Turn it off and back on again. Wait. Unplug the other side and plug it back in. Wait. Turn it off and back on again.
*CLICK!
The loud sound of the camera shutter opening tells me I did something right. "It's supposed to work. So it must work." The fidelity of what worked, however, is very low. All I know to do at this point is pull each end of the cable and cycle the power until it works. There's no indication of how many times, which end of the cable, or how long to wait in between actions. But I got it to work. I hold out hope that the next time I try to use it I can just turn it on as I normally would. But if it decides not to work again, I have this obtuse starting method as a backup.
Things are fine for the next few months. Sometimes it works. Other times I have to fiddle until it works, but it doesn't take too long. But then something happened. I updated some software. Now it doesn't want to work.
"It's supposed to work. So it must work."
Knowing how I breathed life into the camera before, I can narrow my focus to other things. Maybe the display on top of the camera shows something telling about what the device is thinking when I cycle its power. Maybe the battery door, which has to be closed firmly for the AC to work, loosened over time. Maybe I need to leave the webcam software open at all times now, whereas before I could get the camera working without it.
I look closely at the display.
The final form of my previously successful sequence of actions was to feverishly cycle the power over and over, then turn it off and wait a few seconds, then turn it back on. If that didn't work, I would repeat the process until it did. No more unplugging needed. But I never looked at the display while I was doing this. The camera is positioned just behind and below a mounted monitor, so I have to reach under the monitor and crane my hand back up to reach the power switch. I can't see the display without coming out of my chair and peering around the side of the monitor. Now, as I hunch over in an awkward crouch and cycle the power while looking at the display, I notice the information doesn't always show. Sometimes when the power comes on nothing happens. Other times when the power comes on, the information shows and then immediately disappears. This must have been what was happening when I was doing this blind. When the camera finally turned on, it must have been one of the times the information stayed on the screen, meaning the camera was operating properly.
But it gets worse.
I'm skipping ahead to the present day, several iterations past the sequence of events I just described. I was correct to focus on the display. There are no fewer than six unique ways the information on the display behaves when the power is turned off and back on. Only two of these ways have a hope of providing functionality to the camera, and this was also only after discovering I had to close the webcam software first, then cycle the power, then open the webcam software once the display was on. I did all this via trial and error. 1 way requires me to open the battery door, pop the battery out and back in, and close the battery door. Sometimes that works. When it doesn't, and the display still won't illuminate, I have to reach all the way under the desk and unplug the power from its source, wait a few seconds, then plug it back in. Then repeat the battery dance, and then it powers up. But that just puts me back to square one where I have to cycle the power until I get one of the two approved sequences.
On my deathbed, I will ask myself many things. This behavior will rank high on that list. I've been told I have the magic touch when it comes to getting finicky electronics, software, hardware, and other appliances to work. But I don't think it's magic. Over the years, I've simply spent more time finding ways to get things that are supposed to work working than anyone else might reasonably expect.
What can I say? It's supposed to work.
So it must work.
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