peripheralfocus
Veteran Member
Well, you can't argue with somebody's experience. But you can point out that one cannot reach valid generalizations from one data point.
One or the other of these two companies may, in fact, have better weather-resistance, but I don't think anybody knows which one it is. Figuring it out to any degree of scientific certainty would be an enormously complex project that no one to my knowledge has ever attempted. Certainly not Nikon or Canon.
And the anecdotes cut both ways. For years, John Iacono, one of Sports Illustrated's top photographers -- and, I should say, a good friend of Nikon -- would regale people with the tale of the time he was standing next to a Canon EOS shooter on the rainy sideline of a pro sports event (I forget which one now) and the guy's camera started billowing smoke. Water had leaked into it, it shorted out and caught fire.
But at the very same event where I heard that story (the 1992 U.S. Open golf tournament at Pebble Beach) I heard a UPI photographer named Terry Schmidt tell the story of the time he was shooting Tom Watson at a previous U.S. Open. Watson supposedly hated photographers and their noisy cameras. In the middle of Watson's backswing, Schmidt's F2 motor drive shorted out (a known problem in the rain with F2 motors, according to Schmidt) and the camera started firing at full speed. Watson shanked his drive and spun around with hate filled eyes, so Schmidt dropped the camera on the ground and backed away with hands held high to show it wasn't his doing. The camera clattered away on the ground until it ripped the film out of its cartridge. (Terry Schmidt, by the way, is still the archetype of a wire service shooter in my mind: Unkempt mustache, fixer-stained t-shirt, cameras worn to the brass, a slight tilt to the left from carrying a 400/2.8 over his left shoulder at a thousand sporting events, too intimate a knowledge of drinking holes near stadiums, a keen mind, a wonderfully wry sense of humor, and 10 lifetimes worth of great stories.)
Anyway, those stories are old, but I can assure you that Canon and Nikon were both boasting about their ruggedness and weather resistance in those days, too. Everybody's got good stories and bad ones.
One or the other of these two companies may, in fact, have better weather-resistance, but I don't think anybody knows which one it is. Figuring it out to any degree of scientific certainty would be an enormously complex project that no one to my knowledge has ever attempted. Certainly not Nikon or Canon.
And the anecdotes cut both ways. For years, John Iacono, one of Sports Illustrated's top photographers -- and, I should say, a good friend of Nikon -- would regale people with the tale of the time he was standing next to a Canon EOS shooter on the rainy sideline of a pro sports event (I forget which one now) and the guy's camera started billowing smoke. Water had leaked into it, it shorted out and caught fire.
But at the very same event where I heard that story (the 1992 U.S. Open golf tournament at Pebble Beach) I heard a UPI photographer named Terry Schmidt tell the story of the time he was shooting Tom Watson at a previous U.S. Open. Watson supposedly hated photographers and their noisy cameras. In the middle of Watson's backswing, Schmidt's F2 motor drive shorted out (a known problem in the rain with F2 motors, according to Schmidt) and the camera started firing at full speed. Watson shanked his drive and spun around with hate filled eyes, so Schmidt dropped the camera on the ground and backed away with hands held high to show it wasn't his doing. The camera clattered away on the ground until it ripped the film out of its cartridge. (Terry Schmidt, by the way, is still the archetype of a wire service shooter in my mind: Unkempt mustache, fixer-stained t-shirt, cameras worn to the brass, a slight tilt to the left from carrying a 400/2.8 over his left shoulder at a thousand sporting events, too intimate a knowledge of drinking holes near stadiums, a keen mind, a wonderfully wry sense of humor, and 10 lifetimes worth of great stories.)
Anyway, those stories are old, but I can assure you that Canon and Nikon were both boasting about their ruggedness and weather resistance in those days, too. Everybody's got good stories and bad ones.
Do you have Vulcan blood??
