Camera insurance never looked so good
Posted: May 5th, 2010 | Author: Wade | Filed under: Back stories, Gear | Tags: Business, Insurance | 2 Comments »Pro cameras can appear pretty expensive compared to the semi-pro variety. Sometimes there mightn’t seem to be much difference in the megapixel stakes, the frame rate or picture-quality. But there’s one other measure that accounts for some of those extra dollars — build quality.
Drop a prosumer camera off your shoulder and you’ll probably need a new one. Drop a pro body and as long as the lens survives you’ll likely not miss a beat. The latest and greatest Canon has 76 gaskets and seals making it rain proof. The top Nikon is built like a tank. But for this you pay.
For newspaper types the cost of such pro-specs pays off. It allows press photographers to get about four years out of a typical body, each of which is in the field five days per week, in rain, heat and cold, all year round while getting plenty of undeclared hard knocks along the way.
But par for the course can be the kind of incident no camera will endure.
An old friend, while on his first assignment with a new employer, dropped a $100,000 Betacam into Dilli Harbour after an excited kid knocked it off the wharf there. He had unfortunately committed the cardinal sin of walking away from a TV camera on a tripod. He kept his job.
A colleague who will remain nameless fell into a concealed puddle — cameras on either shoulder — with one getting momentarily but completely submerged. He had the presence of mind to immediately remove the battery and then leave it for a couple of days to dry out. It continued to work normally for a couple of weeks but then needed Canon’s special attention.
One dropped his near new 1D Mark II into the olympic pool at Homebush (Canon couldn’t help), while another sent a brand new Canon 1Ds to its grave by not sealing an underwater housing properly before entering the water.
In Canberra’s bushfires of 2003 one of our team lost what was then a $20,000 Canon D2000 while running for dear life, after its strap got caught on a tree branch. Unlike the camera, the photographer was lucky enough to get away unscathed.
But perhaps harder to watch than any of these scenarios is Canon staff pulverising half a million dollars worth of stock because it didn’t pass their strict quality-control.
We’d been shooting for like 20 minutes without getting our feet wet by the waves, but all of a sudden a rather big wave came rolling into shore. It knocked my tripod to the side and I saw my camera bag float off up on the shore
My friend’s camera got splashed, but she managed to grab it before it was knocked over. I ran up to my camera bag and poured out the water, almost expecting there to be fish and crabs in it. But sand and salt water was enough. I didn’t even want to look at my former white lens that now had turned brown by all the sand covering it. Chaos.
My 5D Mk II wasn’t cooperating very well, and I turned it off for the day, hoping it was just a nightmare and that it’d wake up again after the shock. My friend was devastated because she was the one who wanted to go to the beach the most. She said she’d rent me a new body the next day so that I could have something to shoot with during my visit. Late the same night I had gotten a lot of sand blown off from my camera, and it did actually work again! Morning arrived and we went to downtown L.A. to shoot some architecture, and my friend was kind enough to at least rent us a 70-200 f/2.8 at a camera store ($90 for a week isn’t all too bad) so that we could get up close. Everything was fine. But then the display on my camera stopped working and the auto focus gave up. Disaster!
Somehow I managed to get it to work again after half an hour, and we got some nice shots during our day in the big city. But the next day the display stopped working again, and I went back to Sweden with a busted camera and lens. The service center wanted $200 just to look at the camera and lens and they’ll give me an estimate withing three weeks, if the gear is worth trying to repair. I guess I’ll never go down to the beach again to shoot. I’ve learned my lesson…