Outdoor Discoveries

Camera repairs

Something like this might feature on my technology blog but the influence on outdoors activity causes me to post it here. Within the last twelve months, two of my cameras developed faults and the first of these became the second to be fixed. The order of repair was driven by importance.

In recent months, the shutter of my Olympus PEN E-PL5 was becoming stuck but restarting the camera sorted out the problem until my July trip to Ireland when a brief photography session in Cork city was halted because that no longer worked. An enquiry of Olympus resulted in the five year old camera being sent to them for repair. This cost me in excess of £100 but things were turned around quickly and the camera is back with me again.

Last December, I discovered that my Canon EOS 5D Mark II started overexposing images by in excess of two stops while on a day spent reconnoitring around Abergavenny, Brecon, the Black Mountain and Neath. Needless to say, my photographic efforts that day were stymied by the camera failure though that too occasionally manifested itself in preceding months. The camera was sent to H. Lehmann in recent weeks and was returned yesterday after a repair costing me nearly £200 when you include carriage. The added cost was because of the professional grading of this camera.

Thankfully, my main camera continues to function well and I never really had any problem with the Pentax D-SLR cameras that I have owned so the aforementioned outages were far from critical. That is just as well given the cost of such repairs and I now have two cameras to test to see how they now perform.

That of itself can encourage outdoors outings since I have been quiet on that front recently. The start of of the autumn storm season is upon us and both Ireland and Scotland have been affected already so memories of last year’s Storm Ophelia return to mind. Still, there might be sunny interludes to come yet so they could offer a chance and we still have October and November to come while the winter often brings pleasing light. The year is not over yet.