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The Solar Eclipse of 2017 Destroyed Lots of Rental Camera Gear (petapixel.com)
Despite numerous warnings sent out to renters, a number of LensRental's camera equipment came back damaged and destroyed from the solar eclipse of 2017. PetaPixel provides pictures in a report that shows some of the damage. One photo, for example, "shows a Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 lens that had its aperture blades partially melted by the sun during the eclipse," while another shows a Canon 7D Mark II shutter being burned so bad that "the heat went past it and damaged the sensor behind it as well." LensRentals, one of the leading camera rental companies, writes about the destruction in a blog post on their website: The most common problem we've encountered with damage done by the eclipse was sensors being destroyed by the heat. We warned everyone in a blog post to buy a solar filter for your lens, and also sent out mass emails and fliers explaining what you need to adequately protect the equipment. But not everyone follows the rules, and as a result, we have quite a few destroyed sensors. To my personal surprise, this damage was far more visually apparent than I even expected, and the photos below really make it visible.
The images above are likely created because people were shooting in Live View mode, allowing them to compose the image using the back of their screen, instead of risking damage to their eyes by looking through the viewfinder. However, those who didn't use live view (and hopefully guess and checked instead of staring through the viewfinder), were more likely to face damage to their camera's mirror. While this damage was far rarer, we did get one particular camera with a damaged mirror box caused by the sun.
The images above are likely created because people were shooting in Live View mode, allowing them to compose the image using the back of their screen, instead of risking damage to their eyes by looking through the viewfinder. However, those who didn't use live view (and hopefully guess and checked instead of staring through the viewfinder), were more likely to face damage to their camera's mirror. While this damage was far rarer, we did get one particular camera with a damaged mirror box caused by the sun.
Really, not news at all.
This is an incredibly good example of what happens to your EYES if you look up at the eclipse without protection.
That $11.5K lens, though. OUCH.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Dumb Americans used their eyes and/or cameras to view the eclipse.
Smart Americans used certified eclipse glasses and/or rental cameras to view the eclipse.
my pussy hurts
I need someone to blame about my life choices.
At least according to the president who has rose colored glasses that protected his vision.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
From TFA:
"Thankfully, there were relatively few items that were returned to LensRentals with this type of damage"
Is it even possible to get a decent (zoomed)picture without using a solar filter? Even if the shutter/sensor didn't get damaged?
Do you really expect them to follow instructions? They should have made the blog post into a political propaganda piece. Something like, "If you wreck the camera, we will kill all Nazis"
First of all, this whole mania about not looking at the sun ever is absurd. People do it all the time between eclipses with no lasting damage.
Secondly, this is NOT an example of what happens to your eyes looking at the sun, unless you are looking at the sun through several layered magnifying glasses - which is essentially what a telephoto lens is.
Now what you don't want to do is stare at it for longer than a second or so, but brief glances are OK. However you'll not be able to see a partial eclipse that way, the rest of the sun is too bright - so you really need glasses just to see anything.
Similarly for camera gear, if you pre-focus, quickly move the camera to the sun, shoot, then turn it away - there's no lasting camera damage. However what you really REALLY do not want to do is to be looking through an optical viewfinder when that happens, there even a second can hurt your eyes. But live view with an LCD viewfinder is fine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Interesting.
I am an avid photographer myself and I wouldn't dream of these kind of stupidities.
Yet I can very much understand technically challenged people not understanding the consequences of their decisions.
On the other hand, they did understand there was a need for specialist equipment that even on rent won't be cheap, and now they are told their insurance doesn't cover it.
At the end of the blog with scary pictures Zach Sutton writes he was surprise how few equipment was actually damaged yet he also writes this is only a small sample.
So now I get really interested to know what percentage came back damaged.
Then we can use that number to extrapolate how many personal equipment was burnt.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
...this one got a quite lasting image of the sun!
No. No it did not. All of that rental equipment showed up in the users' hands in boxes or cases. The USERS are the people who destroyed the equipment. It's like saying the brick is what destroyed the chef's knife that someone was using to try to cut it in half. Why does any of that matter? Because usage like that just drip-drip-drip reinforces the notion that people aren't responsible for their own actions, and that particularly cancerous concept spreads into all sorts of dangerous places.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I didn't look at the stupid fucking eclipse.
Unlike all the retards who went "ooh, ahh..." at a fucking SHADOW, I see eclipses of the sun ALL. THE. TIME., so it doesn't really impress me at all. How do I see these total eclipses of the sun? Simple, I stand on Earth, and watch as a massive object passes in between me and the sun. Namely, THE FUCKING EARTH. It's called, "sunset."
The eclipses tend to last for HOURS over almost the entire populated surface of the world, and end in a beautiful and magnificent event, called, "DAWN," "SUNRISE," or "SUNUP".
Now, I know that for scientists, the eclipse has occasionally been a useful and remarkable thing; decades ago it was used to prove (or rather tended to confirm,) Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, by giving a rare opportunity to observe stars normally invisible due to the interaction between the sun's light and the sky. By taking photos of the briefly visible stars whose light passed close by the sun, the shift in apparent position relative to other stars in the sky, demonstrated that the light coming FROM those stars that the light passing near the sun MUST be bending in response to something, (i.e., the sun's gravitational pull,) which is a pretty amazing thing, I'll grant.
BUT all the dip-shits staring at the sun, or ruining their (or someone else's) cameras by trying to take pictures of the eclipse are just fucking morons. They're not trying to confirm a scientific theory. They're not looking to take magnificent photos. These are the same fuckwits who take pictures of their FUCKING FOOD and their dogs wearing tiny sweaters or moose antlers or little red noses, which I'm sure those animals HATE and sharing them with their so-called "friends," who are also morons, evidently because they don't immediately unfriend the jackasses who do this shit, and move on with their lives.
So I prevented harm to myself and my precious cameras by NOT pointing them at or near a giant ball of fire in the sky.
If you weren't a complete shit-for-brains, you no doubt did the same.
If on the other hand, you're having to listen to these words read to you by a screen-reader-app, because you looked right at the sun and burned your retinas, FUCK YOU, you fucktard, you got what you deserved. Unless somehow you, through no fault of your own, managed to miss any of the bazillion warnings NOT to stare or look at the sun you've probably been bombarded with your entire fucking life, if you are within reach of these words.
Also... SOMEONE RENTS PEOPLE CAMERAS?!? In 2017?!? The fuck?
It is exactly an example of what happens to your eyes when looking at the sun.
It isn't the size of the lens which matters, it's the f-ratio. The ratio of the lens aperture (diameter) to the focal length. While a larger diameter collects more light, a longer focal length focuses that light into a larger image. So regardless of lens size, if they have the same f-ratio then the intensity of the light at the focal plane is the same when pointed at the same light source.
The human eye has a f-ratio of about f/2.1 (night-adapted) to f/8.3 (daylight). While the 600mm telephoto gathers a lot more light than your eye, it also focuses the light into a much larger image of the sun, so the energy per mm^2 of sensor isn't as high as you'd think given the large lens diameter. F-ratio goes as the diameter of the lens, while amount of light gathered goes as the area of the lens, or diameter^2. So comparing the 600mm f/4.0 telephoto to your eye at f/8.0, the telephoto's light has only 4x as much energy per mm^2 of sensor as per mm^2 of retina. Consequently, it would only take 4x as long to cause similar damage to your eye than it would take with the 600mm telephoto. Probably a lot less time since biology tends to be much more sensitive to temperature than metal and silicon circuitry.
my mother told me not to stare at the sun
Although an interesting thought experiment about the light collected by an eye vs a lens, you are not factoring in a massive difference - the eye is filled with fluid, while the chamber of a camera is not.
That keeps the temperature regulated, in a way a camera simply does not do...
In fact if you read about HOW eyes are actually damaged by looking at the sun without magnifying elements for too long, heat is not a factor at all - so how can it possibly compare to the damage done by a camera lens which is entirely heat related? It is in fact the result of an internal chemical reaction, totally different...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not only brighter but how the obstruction makes more light reach the viewer?
It doesnt, but while you are preparing the shot, you are pointing at the full sun (with long telephotos as seen fromo the pictures) when it is really high in the sky for quite a lot of time.
I used a Minolta X-9 film camera with a Tokina 50mm f8 RMC Schmidt-Cassegrain lens mounting a solar filter on the front. In between shots I put a box over the lens to shade it to prevent the camera and lens from overheating. I thought it was a pretty obvious thing to do. Apparently it wasn't as obvious others. https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
The problem during an eclipse is that the amount of sunlight hitting your retina is still up in the range where it can cause damage, but not in the range where you'll notice immediately.
Oh really - did you try this during an actual eclipse?
Because even up to 99% obscured, there was still too much light to look at the sun directly without wanting to look away again right away. The light took on an eerie quality to be sure, but was not substantially dimmed until the actual full eclipse. Images I took about a second after the total eclipse ended showed a dark sky but still a massively bright sun, and the end of the total eclipse was about the same apparent speed as someone putting a dimmer up to full brightness over the course of a second or two.
There is no danger from the sun "appearing safe to look at" because at no time did it appear safe to look at until it actually was.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just shooting the sky with a 20mm lens will get you probably several hundred pixels of sun.
That Panasonic 20mm lens has a 57 degree angle of view, while the sun and moon are about .5 degrees each. That means the sun is less than 1% of the size of the image. That's probably 40 pixels in diameter for a high-res sensor. In other words, it's like taking a photo with the sun in it.
In order to actually melt something like that by aiming it at the sun, you'd have to actually have the lens attached to something like a telescope.
I have to guess that the people who actually managed to damage the equipment were those who abused it, not those who just took a few photos of the sun.
dom
From 8/21/2017 solar eclipse? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
A recent article in Chemical and Engineering News discussed just this. The damage comes from over-production of all-trans retinal. Normally, 11-cis retinal is converted to all-trans, which is then converted to retinol, and back, eventually, to 11-cis retinal. It is along this pathway that an signal is generated that says "I got light". Too much light results in an over-abundance of all-trans retinal, which in the presence of yet more light absorbs additional light to eventually produce an excited triplet state. This then interacts with oxygen creating reactive oxygen species that then interact with lipids in the cell, damaging them, and eventually leading to cell damage.
Also, calculations indicate that the local temperature increase caused by directly viewing the sun is only about two degrees, not enough to cause physiological damage.
It seems absurd to give any credit to Petapixel - this report was on LensRentals' site first, and the summary links to the blog - looks like someone just wanted to give Petapixel some free advertising...
Extremely high quality photographic equipment is so cheap to outright buy today-- how can there possibly be a rental business for it? Are these redcams or better?
Shot tons of photos with OnePlus, nothing bad happened.
Some people never listen. All you can do is educate. After that it up to them to listen. Idiots everywhere.
...they maybe they should do a story on rental vehicles too.
tl;dnr: being a fuckwit can be expensive.
Hankwang -- holyshit! You looked at the sun through binoculars!? As the primary test of your conjecture with yourself as the subject? Man - you may be one badass honkey mofo indeed. When I first turned on my Transcranial Current Device the lights flickered. Then I realized that wasn't the lights. Self experimentation is best handled by those of us with the mind and the balls to handle it. Thanks for the data.
more importantly -- What is the backstory to this experiment?
This really might fall in the "You gotta share this one man!" category.
Marcus
justhinkit -- Your point is very logical, efficient and practical. My own behavior is based on your exact points as I care about utility (eat to live) so I can pursue things greater (than talking about gastronomy or my phone-video of a noteworthy event.)
I posit however that the Monkey SeeDo is valuable to humans as a ritual. The value of the Monkey SeeDo is that hominids participating is that they possess a memetic locus around which to establish communication, which is ultimately about distributing resources (including status).
People who think in the terms shared by you and I (in this certain case) don't find value in such rituals.
"Nice weather we're having, Marcus." said Johnny
"I don't talk about the weather unless I'm on a motorcycle or flying an aircraft."
Wow. Now i know why some people think Marcus is a strange asshole,thought Johnny.
Yeah...sure I DO know that humans utilize 'Weather Observation' as a communications handshake protocol. But hey -- Johnny is likely right that I am an asshole.