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Ouch!!!
I went camping in the Flinders Ranges over the weekend through to ANZAC day. It's turned out to be a very expensive trip unfortunately. I got up at sunrise each day to make the most of the early morning light to photograph near the area I was camping in. But in my rush on Sunday morning I forgot to do up the zip on my Lowewpro backpack and flung it over my shoulder as I left the car. The next thing I knew the backpack was a lot lighter and there was 3 cameras, lenses and rolls of film all over the road. My F80 took a big impact as it bounced across the road along with the 80-400 lens that was attached. The camera seems to be fine apart from a few scratches on the battery grip (which probably saved the rest of the camera), but the lens is in pretty bad shape. It's virtually broken off near the aperture ring and all the Vibration Reduction mechanism is cactus, but the optics seem to be OK. I took it to the local Nikon man this morning and it's on it's way to Sydney for quoting on repairs, but so far it's going to cost "over $1k" so he tells me, so it's probably going to cost at least half the price of a new one to fix it. It's a bit disappointing for this to happen but it's not the end of the world, at least all my other gear survived without any damage. It's just annoying that the most expensive piece of equipment in my bag was the one thing that got damaged. I'm going to modify the backpack so it can't happen again. I've had a close call in the past when my compact digi cam was left on the ground after I left the zip partly undone, so I should of known better.
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