I remember getting a phone call from the very nice old man who services and repairs my old Hasselblad film cameras. He started with asking me ‘have you been anywhere wet recently? Because your camera is rusting inside’.

The photo here is of my Hasselblad body (one of two I’ve taken with me on this trip) where the leather exterior has started to peel away due to the humidity, and the body / mirror shows sand inside.

In my view, as much as I love equipment and try to look after it. It will get subjected to wet conditions (Iceland and Japan), and desert / sandy conditions in Iceland and the Atacama. I have worn out several bodies, sometimes in just a couple of years from these machines being subjected to all kinds of conditions. The image always comes first, and if I have to subject my cameras to unkind conditions, then that is ok.

For me, this is no hardship. My cameras are relatively inexpensive to replace. They are all old 1980’s film cameras and lenses. Despite prices for second hand film cameras increasing over the years, they are still very inexpensive compared to some of the new digital cameras out there.

I am always curious as to how much we hold ourselves back in the pursuit of our image making when we are concerned that our camera equipment may get damaged? This is really the issue I am focussing on today in this post. Do you for instance only shoot when it’s dry? Or do you pack your camera away the moment the first drops of rain appear?

Perhaps there is a balance that needs to be reached. A compromise between 'accessibility to all kinds of weather’ against ‘cost of repair’. If you wish to explore places which may be more demanding on your equipment, perhaps budget for spare lenses, and at the very least a spare body. Perhaps even decide to buy two of a consumer camera rather than go all out for the super high end twice-the-price equivalent?

I certainly think being on the lookout for spare lenses, or a spare body is a good way to go. And if you can’t justify owning two, then perhaps think about buying a used backup body for that big trip of a lifetime, to sell on once you get home.

Like learning how to manage our money (which we don’t get taught at school), we should learn to manage our expenditure on equipment to build in a portion of ‘in the event of a failure’.

Always only working in dry conditions, on fair days is going to limit your photography. Not just in the diversity of images you come home with, but also in your learning of working in different kinds of light.

For myself, I always travel now with 2 x camera bodies, 2 x standard lenses, 2 x standard wide angles, plus a superwide. And with my tele’s, I have some overlap in the selection I bring with me, so that if one link in the chain is missing, I don’t feel the gap.