Archive for September, 2009

Just so there is a picture here somewhere… Reflection Lakes in Mt. Rainier National Park. It was not feeling terribly reflective back in July!

Recently the shutter button on my Canon 30D has been failing me. Sometimes I press the button and nothing happens, or it takes a bit of massaging to get it to fire. Not exactly perfect for something thats fast moving or for getting a borderline hand held shutter speed shot. Then there are the instances where it shoots 3 in a row inexplicably (its still on single shot mode). A bit disappointed that the thing would start to crap out on me after only 10,000 exposures. So what to do? I’m betting fixing this will take a few weeks of sending it who knows where – and this was about to be my fall trip time. I imagined a future where I’m somewhere awesome and… voila – the shutter button doesn’t work at all. Kaput. Dead. Not really a situation I was looking forward to. You just know that it would have occurred when something truly epic was unfolding in front of me and I happened to have a strong battery, the right lens, right ISO etc etc.

So rather than deal with the worst case photography scenario… I bought a remote (Canon RS-80N3). I’d been thinking of this for a while – great for the macro stuff I shoot and long exposures… and catastrophic shutter button failure insurance.

On another note… I’m not really satisfied with the prices on photography equipment in Canada. I have bought many things from B&H as a result. I understand that the Canadian Dollar is about $0.90 to the US right now, but sometimes I find that prices in the US are just over half of what I would be paying here. I have yet to find a local retailer interested in matching the price with the exchange rate and shipping, or even coming close – so I buy things in the US when I would rather not. The remote I spoke of above was 1/2 the price at B&H, and the B+W 77mm polarizer I just bought was well over $250 up here. Even with the exchange rate and 30 dollars shipping it is not even close. CMON!