Wednesday, January 6, 2010

6/365 - In its native habitat

A DSLR camera half buried in snow.
Click the photo to see it on Flickr.


This week's Digital Photography School 365 assignment for this week is to show my camera equipment. So -- here it is -- my beautiful Nikon D40x, in its native habitat. That's my favorite Nikon 10-24mm lens on the front. (The photo was taken with my crappy fixed-focus camera-phone, which accounts for the awful image quality.)

Yes, it really is half-buried in a snowbank. After this photo, I shook it off, took it inside (not bothering to wait to acclimatize it!), and snapped a few photos. It worked like a charm.

For those of you who try to treat your cameras with kid gloves, never taking them into even slightly poor weather or nasty situations: I do things like this on a pretty much daily basis. My camera is slung around my back for every hiking, snowshoeing, and camping trip I make. I've face-planted it into the snow without a lens cap, gone in and out of warm houses into 0 degree weather, used it in heavy rain, taken it down rocky hillsides and been hit with stinging tree branches. This low-end camera has survived them all and works like a champ.

Don't let your fear of hurting your equipment get in the way of taking great photos!

6 comments:

D. Travis North said...

Great wisdom...
...of course, don't neglect to get it checked up every once in a while either.

That's a massive shield around that lens. What is that?

DC said...

@D. Travis North: That's just the lens hood (Nikon's included one). Part of it is perspective, but it really is pretty big. I keep it on because ultrawides are so prone to flare (and, admittedly, it does look cool ;).

Summer said...

I gotta say, taking my Olympus to the beach with me all the time did take a toll. I have a great grinding sound when I focus;) Course, it just adds to the ambiance, right? :D

The Gilje Crew said...

Great camera huh!? I have the d40 (minus the x) and love it. I'm going to have to look into that 10-24mm for my next lens. Right now I'm really digging my 50mm.

Michael said...

... and if you're afraid of the weather conditions: get a Pentax :-) Sorry for this commercial. Uh, don't know if I would burry any camera into the snow, but maybe I'm an overprotective father in this kind of things.

pea g. said...

Love it!!! Definitely worth the visit to your blog! I've been thinking about expanding my Flickr "phlog," as my dear mother calls it... Yours is fab!