I Accidentally My Camera. Again.

Yesterday (Saturday) while hiking I accidentally my camera. Again. 😡 Fortunately not my whole camera, just one lens.

I had my camera on a strap around my neck with my ultra-wide angle zoom lens attached. In the web pocket on the back of my daypack was my midrange zoom lens. Usually I switch back to the mid range lens after using the ultra-wide for a specific shot or two because it's so much lighter, but we were hiking through an area where the views were expansive.

Finally we reached a spot where I wanted to zoom in more than my ultra-wide allows. I reached around to the back of my pack and... the pocket was empty. The lens had fallen out!

There was good news and bad news. The good news was I knew where the lens had probably fallen out. I remembered stumbling a bit back up the trail. And it was maybe only 15 minutes back. And it wasn't even much of an uphill to backtrack to it. But then there was the bad news: 15 minutes earlier, when I stumbled and my pack almost slipped off, I was hiking through a marsh.

This joins my list of other camera/lens mishaps:

• In April my expensive ultra-wide lens got borked in the rain at the foot of Mt. Cook in New Zealand. Oddly, and unexpectedly, it started working again 10 days later. That saved me an expensive repair bill (or cost of replacement) though I did miss using that lens for hundreds of pictures on our New Zealand trip.


• An expensive lens was stolen from the trunk of a car two years before that.


• Three years ago I dropped my expensive ultra-wide lens while climbing a mountain. Fortunately I was able to get it repaired for about one-third what it'd cost to replace new.


• In 2018 I dropped my camera on a hike— not on the rocks while climbing a mountain— and the lens snapped off, breaking the lens's mounting ring. The lens I replaced it with was the one that got stolen. And the lens I lost Saturday, a 15-45mm variable zoom I bought just over two years ago, was the replacement for the stolen lens.

I debated whether to go back and look for the dropped lens. On the one hand, it's a "cheap" lens (comparatively, for me) but it's still real money. On the other hand, it's likely lying in water beneath thick grass. I didn't feel like going back and hunting for it. I mean, if it was likely on a clear trail I'd go back for it, but not when it's in a marsh where there was no marked trail I was following.