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Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - 6:06PM

New digital camera

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and shut down my operation.

In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.

Circuit City had the best price for the camera I ended up choosing, the Fuji S700. The local store here was still honoring the online sale price, so I went down and picked it up this afternoon. I also bought a 1GB SD memory card, which means I'll likely never have to offload photos to the laptop until the end of an storm chase day. Both items were on sale, the total coming in just over $260.

New Fuji S700

If you're a DSLR user, you're probably not impressed with this camera. But that's OK - I don't need the high-end features and resolution of a DSLR right now. Like I said before, I'm a more of a video person rather than a stills person. During a chase, my hands are usually full enough operating the video cameras, and I rarely have time to grab any stills. As such, it doesn't make sense for me to put $1,000 on my credit card for a DSLR that I won't have enough hands to use most of the time. This new camera will be used exactly how the old 4700 was used - for web site photos, graphic design imagery and for leisure scenic photography.

My first test of the new camera was on the Azalia bush in front of my house. The bush was in full bloom a few weeks ago before the deep freeze of early April totally obliterated it. This afternoon, I saw that one bud on the entire bush had managed to survive, and was the only one in bloom among the rest of the dead and withered buds.