Don’t forget to pre-flight your gear!

Hoodoo Landscape. Vedauwoo, Wyoming, 2013

Well, it finally happened. A minor disaster (very, very minor, really, in the world-wide scheme of things). I was able to go almost four years with my current kit with no big breakages. My lucky streak finally ended yesterday, in that haunted, bizarre, granite wonderland that is Vedauwoo, Wyoming.

Big Lesson: There are two basic checklists you ought to run whenever you go out to shoot….

1) Reset all your camera settings to whatever is your standard, and make sure the memory card and battery are healthy. (I hate to shoot beautiful landscapes at ISO 1600 due to ignoring this, but I was very good about this first checklist yesterday.)

2) Check your camera pack to make sure you have all the lenses, filters, cards, tripod, and other accessories you might need. Then, make sure the ZIPPERS ARE ZIPPED tight! (I hate it when that telephoto lens rolls out of my pack and smashes its way along and down fifteen vertical feet of rough granite before wedging in a crack…yep, that was yesterday’s piss-hap).

So now you know.

Weird noises coming from within when I shake it. Attachment ring smashed. Lens hood cracked. Amazingly, the glass was intact on either end (although who knows about inside).

Nikon’s website for repairs seems to be pretty straight-forward…start here, click on the yellow “Schedule a Repair” tab, then fill out the required info as you click your way through each of the following pages. You’ll have to pre-pay (in my out-of-warranty-it-was-my-fault-anyway case, $199.00), but then you get to print out a mailing label and instructions on how and where to ship your damaged beast.

While I wait for the verdict from Nikon, I’ll be restricted in the variety of focal lengths I can use…I’ll have to retrain my eye a bit. Not such a bad thing, that.

When I know, I’ll update you on whether the patient is cured, or laid to rest at the Nikon morgue.