Crash bang wallop!

Crash bang wallop!

That awful moment when you feel your grasp slipping – was the first thing you noticed the thud as your pride and joy hit the ground?

The first camera I remember dropping was a Lubitel 2, an incredibly cheap and oddly-specified Russian camera. I’d bought it in a tourist shop in Leningrad on a schools cruise in 1971, if I remember rightly: I paid around £2, in an assortment of coins from three or four countries. But it was plastic, and brittle plastic: a drop onto concrete rendered it useless, the back parted from the rest of the body.

In fairly quick succession, two cheap straps deposited two Contax bodies on the deck, cracking the pentaprism in each case. This was in the days when Photax had a showroom on York Street underneath Waterloo Station: the second one, broken in London, was repaired the next day.

Since then, high impact events have done less damage to my kit. My favourite lens – locking tab worn down from use – plummeted three feet to the pavement outside Moor Street Station in Birmingham, landing on the aperture ring. Amazingly, the only result was considerable stiffness of the ring: after a trip to the local repairer it’s been fine, with a new mount (that locks onto the camera) and a little easing of the bent aperture control.

A couple of years ago, a missed footing led me to fall over in Birmingham, and land using my newly-acquired Alpha 7R as a landing device. There are scratches on the baseplate, but operation is unimpeded – it was around a year before the hand holding onto it would grip properly.

In the last few days, I’ve been playing with a Nikon brick. Would that I had checked that the strap was securely attached: and that after the first drop, I’d checked the other end. It was equally poorly secured, leading to a second drop. Nikon’s reputation is undamaged, as is the camera.

I suppose the lesson I learn from this is to do periodic checks on straps and so on: the majority of them are prone to wear and tear, and won’t last forever. If there are clips, check them! Look at attachment points. And never, ever, buy a cheap strap that looks good but doesn’t have the engineering to back up the appearance…

The model in today's image is (of course) my friend Joceline: delicacy forbids me showing you the grim reality of a broken camera... Joceline looks as if she may be contemplating a dropped camera, though...