Everybody here shoots near the sea. Almost nobody here rinses a lens barrel, and the repair bill arrives about three years later.
Every photographer in this country works in the worst environment there is for equipment, and most of us learn that the expensive way. Salt spray, humidity above eighty per cent, sand, and boats. Here is what actually happens and what we do about it.
Salt does not corrode the outside of a lens, which is what people expect. It gets into the zoom and focus rings, where it dries into a fine abrasive, and then every turn of the ring grinds it into the barrel. The symptom is a zoom that feels gritty about eighteen months later and a repair bill at three years. The fix is embarrassingly simple: after any shoot near spray, wipe every barrel and ring with a cloth damp with fresh water, then dry it. Not a dry cloth, which just moves the salt around, and not a wet one either.
Humidity is the slower problem. Fungus grows inside a lens in still, warm, damp air, and it eats the coating on the glass. It cannot be cleaned off without stripping the lens. What prevents it is air movement and dryness, so a camera bag left zipped in a cupboard is the worst place a lens can live. Ours live in a cabinet with a dehumidifier in it and we turn it on every night, which costs about the same as one lens repair over ten years.
Sand and the boat. A lens is never changed on a boat, and if it has to be, it happens below deck with the body pointing down. We carry two bodies with different lenses specifically so that nobody has to change one at sea. Sensor dust from a mid boat lens change is a day of retouching on every frame with sky in it, and it is entirely avoidable.
The condensation trap is the one that catches visitors. A camera taken from an air conditioned room into outside air fogs instantly, inside and out, and it takes about twenty minutes to clear. If the shoot starts at five and the equipment is in a cold room at half past four, the first ten minutes are unusable. We take the bags outside half an hour early, still closed, and let them come up to temperature before opening them.
And batteries, briefly. Heat kills them faster than use does, so a bag left in the sun for an afternoon costs you real capacity. Ours go in the shade with a cloth over them, which is not sophisticated and works.
None of this is difficult. It is a rinse, a cupboard, a rule about lens changes and half an hour of patience, and together they are the difference between equipment that lasts eight years here and equipment that lasts three.