Expensive"oops" moments

[Kevin M Bourque]

Hi everyone ?

Ever killed a camera or lens in a really spectacular or interesting way?

I was shooting yesterday evening in the marsh on a barrier island here in SC. I was carrying the camera to a promising piece of driftwood when the lens board a nd lens did a slow-motion dive off the camera. If you?ve never been to southea st coast, we have this stuff called ?pluff mud?. It?s slimy and sticky and smel ls bad, and it?s no friend of anything delicate. ?Pluff? is the sound your Rode nstock makes when it lands. Yuk.

I?m usually pretty careful with lenses in the field. I figure I must have put t he camera back in the bag (with lens still attached) and somehow loosened the sl iding gadget that secures the lens board from the top. I?ll tug on it twice nex t time.

I freaked, of course. It was just covered in gray goo. I got it home as quick as possible and gave it a gentle and thorough cleaning. I was encouraged that the shutter still worked?.I may have gotten lucky on this one.

While we?re waiting to see if the patient recovers, I want to hear about your ex pensive ?oops? moments; the ones where time passes in slow motion and you exerci se your vocabulary of plumbing words.

I know I?m not the only one who ever had one.

[neil poulsen]

My standard Arca-Swiss bellows is still somewhere in New England. Anything that relates to Arca-Swiss qualifies as expensive.

I have a medium format backpack where the cover opens to display all that is within. I picked it up one time forgetting to zip up the cover.

I had a table recently at a swap and sold quite a bit. Come tax time, I fretted about whether or not I should report these earnings. Then, it occurred to me that I've never made a profit on anything that I've ever bought or sold.

[Per Volquartz]

When a 210 Symmar-S lands in a jungle stream in the Philippines it goes "plop"!

[Ellis Vener]

packing up very quickly in a rough neighborhood, I forgot to put the Rodenstock centerweighted filter for a 90mm f/4.5 lens in the case and had the displeasure owfwatching slide off the hood of my Explorer as I started it up.

[Paul Schilliger]

I had the chance to hear the "kriss" of a brand new S-A 90/5,6 landing on a hip of gravel once. Very interesting sound. Luckily the damages were limited to some scratches in the coating of the back element, mostly outside the utile area. Another time, the whole Linhof fell from the tripod over my shoulder to the road. The Horseman viewer who made the office of a bumper had a strong "crrakk". Since that I use extra ca re when fitting the lensboards to the cameras and I replaced my two Bogen quick fits by the newer secure ones. Sti ll, I am always in some post trauma expectations when I handle my gear!

[Christopher Campbell]

Years ago, before I had a permanent set-up for photographing large, two-dimensional works of art, I occasionally had to photograph big architectural drawings spread out on the floor using a Hasselblad bolted to a ceiling joist. One very late night, already too tired, and in the process of putting the camera in that position, I loosened the attachment bolt to fine-tune the camera's alignment and went too far . . . Crash! Watching the camera nose-dive to a concrete floor eight feet below, crash landing on the front of a 120 Makro-Planar lens is one off those slow-motion surreal moments you never forget. As I recall, Hasselblad USA sent the lens off to Sweden, and they completely rebuilt it for something like $800. Ouch.

[Hal Hardy]

How about a stupid incident? I'll give you stupid!!!

My other bank breaking hobby is high end airguns. One day I was alone in the house, adjusting the trigger pull on my highest powered airpistol in the bedroom. After each graduated adjustment, I would test it by firing into a box full of newspapers (that's not the stupid part). I eventually adjusted it past the point of safety. I cocked it with the muzzle pointing away from the box (that was the stupid part).The trigger held for 5 seconds (giving me a false sense of security), then released itself just as I was bringing it in line with the box. My Zone VI camera was on the tripod safely? off to the right.The .22 caliber pellet hit the rear standard and buried itself into the wood thankfully causing only cosmetic damage. The only thing that saved it is that the pellet passed through the corner of the target box. The box absorbed most of the energy. If the pellet had been 3/4" to the left, it would have missed, probably going through the drywall and ending up in the laundry room. To the right and it would have traveled through the camera,end to end, at least shattering the ground glass.

Fred Picker still owned Zone VI then. I wondered if I sent the back to them for replacement under their any-reason-at-all warranty, would this incident end up in their catalog showing how serious they were about the warranty. I decided to keep it as a safety reminder to myself.

[Jason Greenberg Motamedi]

I dragged my 5x7 Korona, still attached to tripod, 7 miles hanging off the back of my motorcycle. Needless to say, there wasn't much left of the Camera, or of the tripod hear, but the lens was fine, once I dusted off the sawdust!

[Rob Pietri]

How about my Zone VI spot meter doing a swan dive out of my pocket and down the back steps? Not very exciting but I have been very fortunate so far in my 20 years.

[James Driscoll]

Working on my first book (out right now, it is called 1000 New York Buildings), I was shooting very early in the moring and was still a little groggy. I mounted up a 72mm XL, and had just finished framing and focusing and pulled my head out from under the focusing cloth. I left the cloth on the camera, and exposed my polaroid and than my film. After finishing, I pulled my dark cloth off the camera which in turn pulled up the lens lock and I watched horrorfied as the lens fell to the ground (these thing always seem to happen in slow motion!!!). After picking pieces of the iris off the ground (I always wondered what they looked like!!!), I saw that the lensboard and shutter had absorped all of the impact, leaving the lens intact. Later on that nite, I swapped the scales from the busted shutter onto a new copal 0 shutter I just happenend to have lying around and was back in business. The lens is still mounted on the same lensboard, which is a testament to how well made Sinar lensboards are, surviving a 5 foot drop onto stone!!! For those of you who actually want to look the photo taken right before this happened is on page 545 and is #964. Also on this same project, I managed to drive not once but twice with the groundglass back on the roof of my car!!! Both times nothing happened besides me feeling more than a l