Since early in 2015, I have been using two Nikon D300S digital cameras for my work at The Ada News. They are great cameras, made better by recent advances in noise reduction software from various vendors. They shoot at eight frames per second, the color is great, autofocus is fast, and they fit well in my hands.

These cameras aren’t flawless, but as they and I have aged, I’ve learned to manage their quirks. This model is known to give an error message on the first couple of frames at the start of a session, so I got in the habit of squeezing off a couple of frames even before I bring the camera to my eye. One of them will occasionally think it’s battery is dead, but turning it off, then on again clears it.

The weirdest mystery of the D300S is that if I let them sit for a while, their highest frame rate will drop from eight frames per second to about six. All the settings are the same, as are the CF and SD cards in them, and the big battery. This usually happens in the summer when I have fewer sports to shoot, and when I have an intern like I did this summer, and let the intern shoot most of the photos.

The even bigger mystery is that within a week or two of the start of fall news and sports season, as I shoot more and more day after day, week after week, the eight frames per second returns.

I’ve never had these cameras repaired, so I don’t know if that would even address the issue. It might be the way the capacitors and resistors in the circuit boards change as they age. Or it might just be a ghost in the machine.