Nikon What’s wrong with my P900? (the nose knows)

Jock Elliott

Hall of Famer
Location
Troy, NY
Went for a walk the other day with my better half and the P900 slung around my neck. I pulled the camera to my face for a shot only to be greeted not by the scene I wanted to photograph but an animation displayed on the EFV.

“Connecting to smart device,” it said, showing a bunch of colored squares running around in a circle. In the lower right corner, I read: “Press OK to cancel.” So I did, and the camera resumed normal operation. Oddly, this had never happened before in all the times that I have used the P900.

The very next time went to take a shot, it did the same thing . . . and the next time. Pressing OK stopped the “Connecting to smart device” operation, but it was annoying to have to do this every repeatedly. I thought maybe the P900 and its Expeed C2 processor had lost its tiny little mind.

It wasn’t until the next day that it slowly came to me what was going on. I am left eye dominant, so I press the left side of my face against the camera to look through the EVF.

Normally I wear glasses. Since my cataract operations, I don’t need them for middle and long distance vision, but for convenience I wear bifocals with plain tops and those thumbnail “reader” lenses in the bottoms. They make life easier when I’m trying to see at a distance and also read something close up – like looking at the shelves in a store and reading a shopping list or looking through an EVF and reading the controls on the back of a camera.

But on this day, I had tucked the glasses in my pocket, figuring I had enough familiarity with the camera controls to work them while looking solely through the EVF. Without the glasses, my face was closer to the EVF, and my nose was poking and activating the WiFi button almost every single time I looked through the EVF.

I put my glasses on, and the problem vanished immediately.

Has anyone else had portions of their anatomy cause strange camera behavior?

Cheers, Jock
 
Funny story Jock. I had to turn off the touch screen of the GM1, as I somehow managed to set the focus point in the bottom right corner all the time. I have no idea which body part to blame, but I'm quite sure it's mine..
 
I've been blessed with a rather ample (but surprisingly underperforming) nose which often gets in the way on various cameras. Usually though, it's just an annoyance and it's not activating any of the controls (as long as I have stupid touchscreen functions disabled).
 
Well, my nose regularily moves AF points around if I'm not careful ... On the Olympus E-M10, I work around that by using the SCP and the EVF most of the time (the LCD gets used very rarely for composition), on the D5500, I actually flip the screen closed (I don't disable the touch function because it can be really handy sometimes). On the LX100, I have to avoid using the exposure compensation dial when shooting one-handed - the slight shift of my right hand means that the lower part of my thumb starts pressing various buttons, bringing up menus and stuff - very irritating ... Oh, and my right thumb also took a couple of images with my E-PL7 without me even noticing :) All in all, I think touch screens aren't really made for me (or the other way round ...).

M.
 
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