What happened when I dropped my Nikon SLR
August/26/2007
A few days
ago I dropped my Nikon D-200. Actually, it fell out
of my camera bag and bounced around on the rock-hard
tiled floor. (I'll try to avoid using the word
"horror" in this post.) I was on a shoot, with the
bag around my waist, in a really elegant
hundred-year-old building, working with a model on
some stuff for both of our portfolios. I leaned
forward to pick something up and hadn't zipped up the
bag. Unpleasant scenarios played out in my mind (the
warranty expired last week) and I thought about how I
wished that this were happening in a much less
interesting room that was thickly
carpeted.
I'm going to give some credit to Nikon for this next part, which is that the camera, so far, seems to work perfectly. The VR lens doesn't zoom quite as smoothly as it did before (there had to be a price of some kind, pretty much, for a mistake like this) but the captures still seem about as sharp as they were before. I feel that I'm pretty lucky getting out of it with just lens repair or replacement.
I have a Canon point 'n shoot that's without question a great little shooting camera, especially for landscapes, though it's limiting for indoor people work (compared to a pro camera plus some lighting experience). A couple of months after I got the Canon, the lcd stopped working, so I sent it back to Canon (when they answered the phone, they pronounced their company name "Kay-non"). They fixed it at no-charge, but first they ran a little test on me by telling me that the camera had been dropped. It hadn't and I think I made that clear.
There was a blurb on the Luminous Landscape website about a trip to Iceland -- the site's proprietor, Michael Reichmann, went with some notable photographer friends -- and in that piece it was mentioned that they were shooting on this one day where the rain was perpetual. As I recall there were something like 8 Canon shooters and 2 Nikon guys. Two of the the Canon shooters, apparently as a result of the moisture, had mechanical or electronic issues with their cameras; neither of the Nikon shooters did. The article's writer points out that, since there were 4 times as many Canon shooters, it just as easily could have gone the other way.
Maybe.
Sometimes I feel a little protective about Nikon because they've been trounced so hard by Canon, sales-wise, in the states. I felt better the other day when I read that, based on recent figures, they're now outselling Canon in that island country where cameras are born.
I'm going to give some credit to Nikon for this next part, which is that the camera, so far, seems to work perfectly. The VR lens doesn't zoom quite as smoothly as it did before (there had to be a price of some kind, pretty much, for a mistake like this) but the captures still seem about as sharp as they were before. I feel that I'm pretty lucky getting out of it with just lens repair or replacement.
I have a Canon point 'n shoot that's without question a great little shooting camera, especially for landscapes, though it's limiting for indoor people work (compared to a pro camera plus some lighting experience). A couple of months after I got the Canon, the lcd stopped working, so I sent it back to Canon (when they answered the phone, they pronounced their company name "Kay-non"). They fixed it at no-charge, but first they ran a little test on me by telling me that the camera had been dropped. It hadn't and I think I made that clear.
There was a blurb on the Luminous Landscape website about a trip to Iceland -- the site's proprietor, Michael Reichmann, went with some notable photographer friends -- and in that piece it was mentioned that they were shooting on this one day where the rain was perpetual. As I recall there were something like 8 Canon shooters and 2 Nikon guys. Two of the the Canon shooters, apparently as a result of the moisture, had mechanical or electronic issues with their cameras; neither of the Nikon shooters did. The article's writer points out that, since there were 4 times as many Canon shooters, it just as easily could have gone the other way.
Maybe.
Sometimes I feel a little protective about Nikon because they've been trounced so hard by Canon, sales-wise, in the states. I felt better the other day when I read that, based on recent figures, they're now outselling Canon in that island country where cameras are born.
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