I’m not very nice to my cameras. For all that they’re more expensive than everything else I own other than my car, I don’t really baby them at all. I use them, and use them hard. Not combat photographer hard of course, but they get their share of bumps, scrapes, nasty weather, etc.

My old Nikon FGs started acting up after a couple years of this sort of thing, but that may just have been the known electrical problems that many FGs have anyway. My D70 went through its share of rain, fog, sleet (as above), abrupt humidity changes, and so on, and the biggest problem I ever experienced was condensation buildup inside my kit lens that went away after half a day.

I took my D300 out in a pretty steady rain yesterday to get the above shot, and didn’t really think twice about it. I figured if my D70 can handle rain, the better weather sealing on the D300 shouldn’t have any problems. Still, it made me wonder: why doesn’t Nikon put that nifty lens-mount rubber gasket on all of its lenses? Only my 18-70 kit lens, hardly a professional lens, has that extra bit of weather sealing. I don’t know how important it is to have that, but it sure gives me a little extra peace of mind.

I was also thinking about gaskets this past weekend shooting Ultimate on a field space that ended up being very dusty, with lots of grit kicked up and floating around in the air. I’m more concerned about that kind of thing than I am about a little rain, actually.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Gear, Nikon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.