Replace my camera!

Hi, y'all! My name is Josiah, and I'm fundraising for a new camera. My camera is gone, lifted from the hotel where I was photographing Skepticon recently in St. Louis (no, it was not one of the attendees, that I'm certain about). The photographs from Skeptiprom are lost forever; that breaks my heart because I can't replace those.

By and large, I have become a homemaker, and my options for other employment are limited. I'm happy here, satisfied within the parameters of my life over the last few years and even with the fuzziness of parameters in general as a notion. However, my camera is still almost my sole access to not just any disposable income I might be able to generate. Most importantly to me, my camera is my access to the possibilities in the world outside my parameters, my sole access to the activism that is a core element of the me that I want myself to be and the me that helps build the space in the world that I want for others. It so often is the way that I am able to contribute to the movements for justice and humanity in the world, to forward motion and space in the world.

So it's been awfully tempting to spiral into anxiety and panic over the loss of this camera. But I haven't, and not only because I feel secure and safe in other ways that haven't been available to me in the past. I am determined to convert this loss into ambitious opportunity. So I am raising funds to not just at the very least replace my beautiful camera, but upgrade it. I had a wonderful Nikon D7100, a few generations old, but still pretty top of the line, almost professional crop frame camera, and I'm proud of what it did for me. I would love to not only have that equivalent back, but to promote up to a mid-range full frame camera, a Nikon D850.

If we can achieve this, I will already be overjoyed. But I'm gonna be even more ambitious. If enough money can be collected, I would also like to upgrade the lost lens to a photojournalism workhorse lens (because the majority of the activist work that I do leans into creative photojournalism), the 24-70mm 2.8, preferably Nikkor for the build, but Tamron or Sigma also make very fine lenses.

The Nikon D850 costs in the range of $1500-2000, refurbished. A Nikkor 24-70mm 2.8 with Vibration Reduction (a necessity for my hands) costs in the range of $1200-2000, refurbished. Together at the high end of that range, that means I'm going to set a top goal of $4000, but knowing that just replacing my d7100 with a newer generation of the same model (d7500, $750-1000 range) would also be absolutely incredible.

So I'm going to embrace a little ambition and aspiration, and hope with all my heart that y'all see me, hear me.