The Nikon Emergency Room Again

I've never had any serious problems with my Nikon gear, but after the expensive repair on my 24-70, I had some other issues.

First, the sun shade of the 24-70. When I put the lens in my camera bag, no matter whether it's on the body or not, I put the sun shade on the lens in reverse. Which is actually the position that most people have their sun shade in when they're shooting, but that's a whole different matter. The thing is that in the reverse position it didn't lock any more. I'd still hear the click when I put it on, but it didn't actually lock and as a result it fell off constantly when I took it out of the bag or whenever I walked around with it with the sun shade in the reverse position. Nikon Service Center said they couldn't fix it. It was normal wear of the sun shade. I ended up buying a new one that locks a lot better, but still not as good as my other lenses.

The non-stick sun shade

Then the D800. Great camera, love it. Super sharp, giant files, awesome quality. If it works. A couple of times the D800 just froze. The green light on the back of the camera would go on and not go off anymore. Whenever that happened, none of the controls worked. At first I thought I just needed to wait for the gigantic files to be written to the card, but that wasn't it. For a while I thought it was the cold, but then again it wasn't really that cold - the coldest it got was maybe -10C. They don't know what it is, and they are keeping the camera to run some tests.

The little joystick that broke off

One of the first things I bought for the D800 is the MB-D12 battery grip. I don't like the small size of the D800 and I prefer all my bodies to feel more or less the same. And I like to use the vertical release button and the extra battery is nice as well. But pretty soon on our Antarctica trip I lost the little joystick on the MB-D12. Don't know what happened - whether it just fell off or got stuck behind a piece of my clothing or broke off in my camera bag. I never found the little joystick again. Problem was that there was now an opening in the grip that showed electronics. When you're on a trip that includes plenty of sea spray and snow, that's not what you want. I ended up using some Duct tape to close the opening. The missing part has been ordered.

The zoom lens that didn't want to zoom

And then there's the 70-200. Remember the zoom ring that got stuck on my 24-70? Same thing happened with my 70-200. Well, not exactly the same because it didn't get stuck at 50mm, that would be really strange, but it just got harder and harder to twist it. In cold weather it was the worst, and I even messed up the rubber ring that goes around it trying to zoom in or out. Needless to say that's another item I left at the emergency room.

That's it? No, if only. I had three bodies that I used extensively for over a month, and I wanted the sensors to be cleaned. I'm an NPS member, so they do it for free, and Dutch people like free things. They told me I could wait for the sensor cleaning so that I could take at least some gear back home. After about 15 minutes one of the surgeons came out to tell me that something had happened. Something bad. When cleaning the sensor of the D3s, they scratched the sensor. They had to order a new sensor...

Let's hope I've had my share of gear problems by now and that 2013 will be smooth and without repairs.