I’ve been dealing with some tendonitis in my elbow the past few weeks and it was pretty sore after paddling down the Concord stretch of the Assabet before the River Solstice event yesterday evening. So, I reluctantly passed on heading over to Westborough to check up on the Osprey nest there.
My “consolation prize” was to sit in the backyard blind and photograph some birds in our little waterfall. Not a bad way to end the day.
Checking some of the initial items I thought I saw something odd when I went to check the exposures, and after a few more frames I started freaking out. As you can see it got pretty wierd. My camera (a Canon 1D MkII) has been a real workhorse for me and so I was really surprised to see it behaving this way. It was a complete mystery to me because it didn’t look like sensor damage or electronics problems.
After Googling around I found someone with the same problem and the diagnosis was shutter blade failure — which, after thinking about it for a few seconds, made perfect sense. The over-exposed “white” lines and the black diagonal stripes, somewhat blurry, appearing in some frames and not others is a good signature for a mechanical failure and short of the mirror getting in the way the shutter is the other mechanical part of the imager.
So, now I get to pay Canon for a shutter that has failed LONG before its expected lifetime. I figure I’m well below the 100K frames shot and the shutter is rated for 200K actuations. At least I don’t have any major shoots scheduled for the next few weeks.
