1. Cleaned pie from a Canon F1n after a pie eating contest between rival high school football teams turned into a pie throwing contest.
2. Burned a hole in a brand new Domkey camera bag at a brush fire. Used the bag with the hole in it for about another year. I was kinda proud of that one.
3. Got knocked over at a football game and tore a 135/f2 off of a camera body.
4. Stopped to talk to a coworker in the parking lot, setting a full bag of gear on the bumper of his Jeep. Forgot it was there, but he found it when he got home wedged behind his winch.
5. Left a Canon T90 and 20-35/3.5L on the top of my truck while shooting houses for a real estate ad. Happily, it was still there when I got to the next house, which was only down the street.
6. Crashed a motorcycle with a bag of gear while on assignment. Destroyed most of the gear, but called the paper and had another photog come pick up my film. Still made deadline.
7. Got a bunch of salt water in same Canon T90 while shooting scuba divers. Let it dry out on the boat ride back and it worked fine for years.
8. I had an old Canon F1n and a Nikon F3, both with motor drives, that I used to drop on occasion. Back then you could catch the camera on the bounce and keep shooting.
9. Cleaned spit out of more than one lens.
10. Back about 1995, when WWF was still going strong, I was sent to cover a wrastlin' event in town. I was shooting ringside with two bodies, and stashed my camera bag with the rest of my gear underneath the announcers table, where I assumed it would be safe. As part of the show, one of the wrestlers was tossed out of the ring and onto the announcers table. I got a great shot of it, then remembered where my camera bag was. Nothing broke since it was mostly empty.
11. I always kept my gear in the car when I shot for the newspapers, since I had to often shoot on the run. I crashed a little hatch back that I used to have, right into a guard rail, which smashed out the rear hatch and sent a bag of gear careening out onto the freeway at about 60mph. My Nikon 180/2.8 was smashed but held together in one lump pretty well. My 105/2.5 and a 35/2 came apart into tiny peaces across several lanes. I don't even think I found my Vivitar 283 or 285 flashes.
12. Drove across town to shoot a down tree that had fallen through the roof of a home during a storm, almost squashing a family. When I got there I had left all three of my cameras at the paper. One of our editors lived down the street, so I knocked on his door and begged him to loan me his camera.
13. Jacked up the rotator cuff in my shoulder and my arm was in a sling for two weeks. All my cameras were heavy, manual focus back then, so I shot every assignment I had to with an Olympus Stylus point and shoot. It had a 35/f3.5 lens on it and actually took fantastic photos. I used to give it to my young son when he would go to work with me on Saturdays. At the age of six we published a photo he took with it in the paper, and the next Monday my editor chewed me out: "I don't want them thinking this job is so easy a child could do it!"
14. Early in my career, I had a love-hate relationship with a particular Canon F1n body and motor drive. The motor drive was 5fps, really fast for back then, but would occasionally tear the sprocket holes on the Kodak Tri-x film we shot. When it happened I could usually hear the tearing of the film and had to stop shooting or it would continue to expose frames on the same spot of film, ruining the last shot(s). Not too big a deal if I caught it in time. Really, really sucked the time every shot from an assignment was stacked on the same frame of film.
Well, picture me one bright spring day, hiding behind a parked car while FBI and local cops try to deal with a wanted pair of bank robbers barricaded in a home with a child. I've got a 300mm lens on my trusty F1n as the female half of the duo comes out of the house with the baby in her arms to surrender. This is the money shot!
I get off three frames of her surrendering to cops when I hear the film inside my camera tear and have to stop shooting. I'm frantically rewinding the film and put in a new roll, but missed the rest of her arrest. We printed frame three on the front page of the paper the next day:
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