Goodbye old friends.
Photographic gear has a definite lifespan. It’s just a load of hastily-assembled metal and plastic parts which deteriorate and disintegrate over time. My everyday gear is heavily-used, and heavily depreciated, and two of my stalwart bits of equipment have just died. My trusty Nikon D3 body was purchased (used) right at the start of my career, and has seen some mentally extensive use since then.
It has shot various famous people and captains of industry, photographed thousands of bits of clothing including the jacket worn by Daniel Craig in some Bond movie whose title eludes me at this moment. It’s been out on trawlers in the North Sea, in hospitals, on top of cranes, at the side of marathon courses, in temperatures ranging from tropical to sub-zero. The tank-like D3 has been dropped at the edge of Newcastle airport runway, has been used as a hammer to knock bits of a tripod back into place, and accompanied me on various holidays before the nippers appeared.
A simple, 12 megapixel beast, it was in my battered old Peli 1510 case for 18 years before being retired to the camera storage cupboard - safely stored as a backup to the backup for the last 7 years. I delayed selling it until today, as its value was only around £150 in it’s well-worn state and 750,000 shutter count. My huge tax bill is due in 4 months so I thought it was time to get rid so I could start making a bit of a dent in that. I shot a couple of blank frames and downloaded the files to my Mac to ascertain the exact actuation count. None of the images could be opened in Lightroom or previewed on my Mac so I knew something was wrong. I formatted the CF storage cards to eliminate any problems there, and repeated the exercise without success. I noticed that the images were visible on the back of the camera, and there was a large black mass angled across the frame in each one. Upon examination, and by lifting the cameras internal mirror, it became apparent that a major part of the internal workings had worked loose and was dangling in front of the shutter window. The glue inside a camera can lose its effectiveness over time and whatever it’s holding simply drops off.
There’s no going back from this - repairing a 25 year old camera worth £150 makes no sense whatsoever, so despite my emotional attachment to the thing, it goes in the bin - literally!
At the same time, my expensive 14-24mm Nikon lens followed suit as one of the internal elements had dropped out - presumably due to some glue losing it’s efficacy as described earlier. That had actually conked out during a shoot in the summer. It had previously been repaired some years earlier so was living on borrowed time anyway.
Having a few thousand quid spare for replacement equipment at all time is a requisite for this job, as all gear will fail at some point. I’m just clinging on to the belief that my current workhorse bodies will last until I jack it all in. Fingers crossed.
