Tip of the Week 2015-11-1

Storing your lenses

Having a working lens when you go out to shoot is obviously critical to your success as a photographer. Having two failures last year due to a sticking aperture led to a bit of research on the web. The problem is that when you stop down the lens and take a shot, the aperture stays open instead of shutting down to the proper setting leading to badly overexposed shots. This is caused by lubricant seeping onto the aperture blades from the manual focus helicoil.

There are several things you can do to reduce the risk of this occurring. First do not store you lens with the front facing down, if the lubricant does seep with the fromt down it will seep into the aperture blades, facing up it will not. Second avoid placing your lenses in hot places, like the trunk of a car on a hot day. I believe this is what caused my two lenes to fail last year.