Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/11/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]score: desert 2, me 0 my nikon 28-70 died a slow, miserable, grinding death yesterday. the zoom ring has come detatched from whatever component made it function and now, whenever you turn it, there is a grinding noise and desert sand comes out from beneath the ring, tinged dark brown with some oil. leica's more-or-less in operation, but i noticed yesterday when changing lenses that the camera body is full of sand. i wonder what this will do to my film ... i'm also paranoid about my film getting fogged on the way out -- what's the cairo x-ray machine going to do to it ... i've tried to get hand inspections everywhere so far, but sofar, no one has let me with the exception of on the ground here in egypt -- you need to pass through one to get into the egyptian museum and i just pushed my film over the top and nobody said anything. we're leaving tomorrow so the loss of the nikon isn't that great. i also noticed yesterday that the rubber covering the metal has come loose on one side and there's lots of sand stuck to the glue underneath. certianly this has been quite a workout for my cameras ... yesterday we went to see zahi open a tomb in al materia which is the middle-of-nowhere egypt. still, even half an hour out from city central the locals were absolutely fabulous, everybody was eager to help us. the tomb was discovered when a local man tried to build a house on a vacant lot -- about 15 feet below the surface he struck large stone blocks which turned out to be roof vaulting for a greco roman tomb with two sarcophagi and three chambers. i photographed the media swarm around zahi and some of the hundreds of on-lookers, this will nicely tie up my article and it will be sad to go home, but, as i'm rapidly running out of cameras, it's about time. ramadan is going along nicely here. people seem a little anxious around midday and it's impossible to get a taxi around 5:00 as everybody's home for iftar, but everybody seems happy to be alive. linda and i celebrated iftar with some egyptian friends last night and then stayed out on the nile chatting until about midnight. upon returning home we came across a group of about eight soldiers with AK-47's in the park across from our house. as we approached, they stood up and yelled at us (apprehensive yet?) .... "hello! welcome in egypt!" "are you having a good time?" "let us know if we can be of any help to you!" -- i don't know what was stranger, coming across a group of guys with machine guns in a park at midnight, or the fact that it was a super FRIENDLY group of guys with guns. saw one bessa-r at the pyramids in the hands of a german tourist and ran into an archeologist at giza with a iiic. other than that, i haven't really seen much in the way of cameras. bunch of nikons at the Big Media Thing yesterday. an FM and some new thing. we certianly feel extraordinarily safe here. it's a great place, you should all visit -- but keep your camera in an ewa marine bag. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html