Weather Sealing is your friend

For the kind of photography I do, I need my cameras to be reasonably robust. I‘m often shooting in the snow, in the desert, or even in the water, all of which do not play nicely with precision electronic equipment.

And it’s at times like those that you want to have complete faith in your equipment. If you’re worrying about looking after your gear then you’re not focused on making the best photograph.

Because of this, I was slightly concerned that my switch from 1-series bodies to the new 5D mark II might come back to haunt me. While Canon suggest in the manual that the 5DII is as well sealed as the EOS 1n top-of-the-line film camera from the 1990s, reports on the interweb have suggested that the weather sealing on the 5DII is not very good at all. In particular, during Michael Riechmann’s photo tour of Antarctica, fully one quarter of the 5DIIs on the trip died after being exposed to “light rain”.

So after the first couple of months of putting the 5DIIs through their paces, I’m happy to report that mine seem to stand up reasonably well to abuse.

Firstly while shooting in the falling snow in London in February, the cameras got very wet with melting snow, but coped very well.

And more recently while shooting in Jamaica I spent a couple of hours was standing in the sea shooting models on the beach and riding horses through the surf.

On both occasions the waves were higher than I was expecting and when I got soaked, so did the camera - including the WFT wireless transmitter – on 3 separate occasions.

Although I feared for the worst, I’m delighted to report they both came through with flying colours, not missing a single shot.

So it would seem that once again, I have a set of cameras that, within reason, will withstand adverse conditions without any special treatment, which is a great relief.

Unfortunately my iPhone was not quite as tough, and failed to recover from a brief submergence!