Can You Really Trust Yourself With Your Camera?

One of the great things about the development of the smartphone camera is that a lot of people are forgetting about standalone cameras, which of course helps to drive the price down on some excellent digital offerings out there. While Samsung come up with clever ways of making cameras that appeal to those people who have discovered photography through their average smartphone cameras, the usual suspects continue to make great cameras, which now tend to be available at rock bottom prices. It’s not hard to find an excellent SLR for less than £500, and you can pick up great pieces of kit which sit somewhere between an SLR and a point and shoot, for less than £300. This is great for all of those budding photographers out there, but the danger is that people don’t quite value these pieces of kit quite as much as they would if they had spent double the money on them. Common sense will tell you that the value is the quality of the product in your hand, not what had to come out of your wallet to get it there in the first place. With this in mind, it’s critical that you look after your camera!

Accidental Damage

These days the world moves quickly, and that means that budding photographers want to capture the action as it’s happening. There are loads of cameras on the market right now that are fantastic for doing just that, with the Nikon1 J1 being a prime example. The time between depressing the shutter and getting the shot is negligible, but this style of photography really does encourage carelessness! If you grab your camera, and rush to capture the shot, it’s so easy to slip and drop your camera. Not to mention that capturing the spur of the moment happenings does not exactly encourage you to sling the camera around your neck in the first place! It’s out of your hand and on the floor in seconds, normally in a million little pieces!

Water Damage

This is another common problem. People think that just because their digital SLR feels rock solid, doesn’t mean that it takes kindly to constant rain pouring all over it! If you take your camera out in the rain all of the time, you’re asking for trouble. The other problem with many digital cameras now is that they often find a home on a desk, with people transferring pictures from camera to computer. The problem here? Drinks. We’ve all spilled drinks on our keyboard, and that’s not too much of a drama generally speaking, but if your camera takes the brunt of a big glass of Ribena, it could be lights out instead of lights camera action!

Loss and Theft

With the values of these cameras falling, we tend not to hold on to them quite as tightly as we might have done before. This means that it is just that little bit easier to pop the camera down on a pub table for a few seconds more than you might have done in the past, after capturing a great shot. You sit back, enjoy the moment, take a long draw on your drink, and before you know it, the camera is gone. Thieves don’t mind if cameras are a little cheaper on the open market now – they can still sell them more cheaply on the black market and make a 100% profit!
Of course, cameras also get lost. So many great point and shoot cameras slip easily in the inside pocket of a coat, but does that coat always make it home? People are always losing coats, and it’s often the wallet that gets lost along the way. It could easily be your camera too, so you have to stay vigilant.

Insurance and Vigilance

There’s no real answer to any of this. Take more care seems like puerile advice really, but it’s the only thing you can do personally to stop any of these things happening. For most people though, the one thing that does get overlooked when buying a new camera is insurance. Because they are that bit cheaper, it is perhaps a little more easy to think that it’s less important to insure. Sure, if you lose it, it’s not going to cost you too much to buy a new one, but the correlation between cost and insurance cost is always related. If the camera didn’t cost too much, you can be sure that an insurance policy isn’t going to leave you out of pocket by too much. It’s worth having a look at sites such as protectyourbubble.com to find out just how much you would have to pay to cover your camera. It’s sure not to cost you the earth, and could save you hundreds of pounds if the unthinkable happens.