How to destroy your gear

[kvbarkley]

Lens Rentals has a new article about bad things happening with gear, with pictures:

Lens Rentals: How to destroy your gear 

All the usual suspects are there...

[rs-eos]

I avoid color runs in general due to not wanting all that dust on me! Good to know that it really wrecks havoc with gear.  I guess for those that want to capture photos of those events, time to rent a super telephoto and be as far away as possible 🙂

[shadowsports]

Yes.  There are some places I will not go with a camera.  Anywhere that has playa dust, anywhere humid, out in the pouring rain or where the ocean throws spray at your gear.  Seeing those R5 C's was particularly painful.   I'll bet the renters got a big $$$ surprise when they returned those devices.  

[melankaya]

See I had heard about this before and thought it would be something that would ruin my gear too, but then I see this show up on a Canon site. I guess I'm buying a reverse ring and be really careful when using it like this. Possibly the closest to a probe lens I can get.

[cruisintx]

For the motorcycle riders out there, saddlebags on most bikes are not a friendly environment for camera gear. The only bike that MIGHT be smooth enough is the Honda Goldwing. Otherwise, your gear will experience a slow death due to minute vibrations and bouncing as you roll down the road. I learned a long time ago when my wife and I were riding two-up a lot with her Nikon 8008s. The smoothest part of most bikes is the gas tank, making a tank-bag with ample soft padding under and around the camera(s) a must do. I rigged up my tank-bag with soft foam so there was a 1" thick piece under the cameras and two layers of the same foam cut out in shapes that fit the contours of the cameras and lenses. Over the 7 or 8 years we used the bikes for vacations, those Nikons probably travelled at least 25K miles and we never had a problem with them. Then a few years ago, I had the thought of using a padded bag made for a spotting scope as it was long and narrow making it easy to get in and out of the small saddlebags on my most used bike. I lined it with a denser foam than the tank-bag making dividers for each camera and small spots for extra lenses. It only took a couple years of regular day rides of the 200 to 400 miles for our best lens to experience some type of failure requiring an experienced technician to fix. He confirmed a loose ribbon connector to be the culprit and said it was most likely due to the abuse it had in the saddlebags. I recently decided to rework the old tank-bag with soft foam again cut out for our Canon 80D and the most used lens, a 17-85 which is the one that had the failure and a kit 55-250 lens. Hoping to have the same success with that as we did with the Nikons.