Be careful not to leave your camera unattended when animals are nearby — you never know what might happen. We’ve shared a number of videos in the past of animals such as monkeys, octopi, sharks, and seagulls “borrowing” cameras for their own purposes.
French tourist Nathalie Rollandin came across a camera-happy seagull recently. She was visiting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, when she set her GoPro camera down while its was recording. Before she knew it, the camera was being carried away in the mouth of an artsy gull. Once the bird was a safe distance away, it set the camera down and recorded some beautiful footage of itself flying away into the sunset. Read more…
Everyone knows you shouldn’t leave DSLRs unattended in public places on land, but did you know that the same is true for when you’re shooting on the ocean floor? In the video above, one unlucky diver leaves his DSLR rig sitting on the ocean floor while swimming with sharks, only to have a klepto tiger shark swipe it and swim away.
Apparently tiger sharks have a thing for cameras: here’s another video that shows what it’s like to be gobbled up by a shark and then spit out.
P.S. Can anyone identify the rig and/or the camera being used?
A security van transporting roughly £100,000 (~$156,000) in Nikon camera gear was targeted by robbers this past Saturday after the Dublin NPS Roadshow. The thieves made off with the entire truckload of equipment, including demo versions of the Nikon D4 and Nikon D800 — cameras that aren’t available yet to the general public. You can find an list of what was stolen (and their individual serial numbers) here. Camera gear thieves have been pretty active so far in 2012 — just last month someone made off with a pre-production Sigma 180mm f/2.8 lens at CES 2012 in Las Vegas.
Red Peak Branding conducted an experiment last year in which they chained a fully loaded bicycle (bells, basket, lights, and the whole shebang) to a post on a busy New York City sidewalk. They then visited and photographed the bicycle every single day, resulting in the 365-photo time-lapse video seen above. What’s interesting is that the bicycle remains untouched for roughly 230 days, but once small parts start getting stolen the rest of the bicycle soon follows. This might have something to do with what’s called the “broken windows theory“.
There’s some shady business going on at CES 2012 in Vegas. Sigma has announced that one of the lenses it unveiled at the trade show this year, the 180mm f/2.8 macro lens, disappeared after being unveiled on Tuesday. The lens is believed to be one of only two pre-production models that exist.
Looking for a lost camera on the web by searching for its serial number in uploaded photos is nothing new (see Stolen Camera Finder), but GadgetTrak’s new CameraTrace service takes it one step further. For a fee of $10 per camera, the service will actively monitor the Internet for your camera’s serial number. If it ever pops up in a photo uploaded to popular photo sharing services, you’ll get an email notification. Back in August, GadgetTrak’s manual Serial Search helped a photographer recover $9000 in stolen gear.
If you’re ever sitting down in a public place with your camera bag, having it close by isn’t enough to protect it from theft — you need to make sure it can’t be easily snatched. Tom Bird of the UK learned this the hard way: he was at a pub recently when his camera bag suddenly disappeared. It’s contents? Just thousands of dollars worth of gear including a Canon 5D Mark II, a 24-70mm f/2.8, a 50mm f/1.2, a 16-35mm f/2.8 and a laptop. Read more…
The next time you’re walking around with a DSLR around your neck and a stranger asks you for directions, you might want to keep a hand on your lens. Yesterday BBC’s “The Real Hustle” included a short segment in which they demonstrated how easy it is to steal a lens on the street. The con artists simply detach and pocket the camera lens of an unsuspecting photographer while pretending to ask for directions. Apparently this is a real con that thieves are using these days…
Here’s another public service announcement for those of you who travel often (see our warning on zippered bags): the safes in hotel rooms may not be as secure as you think. YouTube user skyrangerpro recently discovered that the safe in his room could be opened with “000000″ regardless of what passcode he chose. This is presumably the “master password” the hotel uses when you’ve forgotten the one you’ve chosen, but the fact that some hotels leave this on factory default settings is cause for concern.
The next time you think about leaving some pricey camera gear in a hotel safe, makes sure all zeros isn’t a working passcode.
