Equipment failures

[Harrison McClary <hmphoto@delphi.com>]

Hello Ted,

You wrote:
>We all fear and ask that question and I've been very fortunate, I've only
>had a
>couple of heart stopping times when something crashed on me, but that was
>usually my own fault for not paying attention.

Having equipment crash while on a shoot is a MAJOR pain in the a..., and I
am sure any of us who use cameras have many horror stories of equipment
failures, heck on one shoot back when I was still doing news I was using 3
bodies and 2 of them went down within 5 minute of each other. (They were
both Nikon-one reason I switched).

I have receently made a very useful discovery.  Always carry a leatherman
tool.  I used to carry a swiss army knife and used it to repair many minor
malfunctions, but the Leatherman tool is litterally a life saver.  On an
adertising shoot for a hospital in Kentucky last month my radio slave quit
working.  The PC plug had come loose.  I was able to disassemble the unit
and repair the problem and put it back togethor in about 15 minutes using
only the Leatherman.  It is nice to have several plain and phillips head
screw drivers and a needle nose pliers all in a unit about the size of a
midsize swiss army knife.

What is the worst thing that can happen when you try to do an in field
reapir...it does not work so you are no worse off than if you had not
tried.  In my above example I would have had to resort to appx 100 feet of
cable to fire my strobe, cable which I would have had a very hard time
hiding.  Fortunatly the repair worked and the unit is still in good working
order.

After all even on a Leica a screw can come loose and really "screw" up your
whole day.


Harrison McClary
hmphoto@delphi.com
http://people.delphi.com/hmphoto