"But I took a landscape shot at midday with the Sun in frame and it didn't melt my sensor". The difference being the length of exposure and the concentrations of energy.
The sun isn’t a garden hose. Putting something in front of it doesn’t make the edges more intense.
That's what they're saying. Zooming in on the sun vs the sun happening to be in-frame.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/patcheudor/35886777354/
I'm assuming the damage Lens Rentals saw was from people who were trying to do time-lapse.
I thought the renters would be paying for it?
> Unfortunately, these types of damage are considered neglect
So yes, somebody owes LR a considerable amount of money for repairing or replacing that £11,000 600mm lens.
The admin of dealing with this crap is built into the rental price. A well looked after lens doesn't depreciate fast.
Unfortunately for the lens, the 600mm lens's drop-in filter slot is behind the iris. So the camera was fine, the lens not so much.
What use could you make of this filter?
I think there's a lesson here in targeting inexperienced consumers. Perhaps a good preventative measure would have been handing out protective lenses before the eclipse so that customers would have really had to try to mess it up.
It might not be good business to express that in a blog post
Then clearly this is the wrong business for you.
Dealing with stupid customers simply comes with the territory.
It hurts just thinking about it, yet some people don’t seem to really believe the warnings.
Edit: To elaborate - Higher magnification lenses (depending on the camera lens used of course)
Edit 1: - /u/corndoge Suggests that people may take this the wrong way. I mean to say in the amount of physical damage it's worse for camera's because of the extra (and typically higher magnification lens). I don't mean that a burnt camera is worse then a burnt eye - I'd rather anybody loose tons of $$$ for a camera then have eye damage.
Higher magnification actually makes it slightly safer, because the image of the sun ends up magnified and spread out over a larger part of the sensor. Low magnification means it all goes to one point.
Our eyes have lenses but as /u/jmiserez said the lenses in the cameras lenses magnify it far more. It'd be like us looking into a telescope looking at the sun (Obviously depends on which camera lens you use).
Edit: I edited the main comment to explain that the difference is that camera's typically have higher magnification lens then our eyes.
It was interesting how most of the post-eclipse reporting was hijacked by a certain politician not wearing his glasses (probably he only looked for a split second anyway). Anyway, this eclipsed (sorry) any reports about the actual event, which must have been one of the largest events in history based on the number of spectators (I saw estimates of 20 million people across the US).
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/lawsuit-amazon-s...
Or when the Queen of England is at an event and doesn't smile for a moment.
Or "woman wears shoes"
or "look at the number of people in this place compared to this other picture where the numbers were different at a different time of the day"
it's all so tiresome
During the short time when the moon completely obscures
the sun – known as the period of totality – it is safe
to look directly at the star
I mostly looked at it through the display on my camera though. Didn’t even cross my mind it could cause damage. Luckily it didn’t
An iphone 6 camera only costs 5$ and is easy to replace(with a screw driver and spudger (maybe an igizmo) most hacker news people likely wouldn't have issues.), so it's not the end of the world (source:I repair phones)
A Chicago Tribune story [2] cited the WSJ [3] saying that Apple said that eclipse photography would not hurt an iPhone.
Forbes says that recent generations of iPhone have sensors and lenses just big enough to cause damage if you point them at the Sun for more than a couple seconds, but that selfies that include the Sun are fine because the front camera and sensor are small [4].
[1] https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/Photographi...
[2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-bsi-eclip...
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/yes-your-iphone-can-photograph-...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykarcz/2017/08/18/dont-le...
i don't buy it. phones get their rear cameras pointed towards to the sun all the time. all it takes is you putting the phone on its back out in the sun. you'd be hearing thousands of reports iphone cameras mysteriously getting damaaged. not to mention that it's not really forbes saying that, it's some blogger that forbes sold its name to (a practice they're infamous for)
The flux is:
Φ/4α² * 1/A²
Φ/4πα * D²
As a first approximation, the sensor can support a certain flux, but once that regime is exceeded the damage is proportional to the energy, not to the flux. So if we talk about the regime where the sensor is not destroyed, flux is the relevant metric, but a larger lens will likely cause more damage once damage actually occurs.
Caution is needed of course. Get ready to put those glasses back on any moment now!
Incredible hues and glow and the surrounding twilight. Can't see any of that with glasses on. At totality, sneak a peek with your naked eyes, it's fine.
Same for camera equipment, it's the setting up and pointing the camera at sun before the eclipse that does the damage. Keep lens cap on until last moment, then take off, and nothing will happen to camera. I've done it at two eclipse festivals, no clouds, didn't even use ND filter! Cameras and eyes fine.
The camera said "error", turned off, I replaced the solar filter, and it was fine. Much longer, and I'd have had a burn. The telescope really collects and concentrates a ton of light.
P.S. Here's the video pointing at the sun all day long: https://youtu.be/HgbG--t3Bd8
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1335775-REG/formatt_h...
multilayered lenses can be destroyed as the expand and contract and heat is emminated from the join and also
Any lense with coatings to correct for chromatic abberation, the coatings get destroyed on the surface of the lenses just by being pointed at the sun.
Taken in rural Oregon (just two shots I selected at random for this post)
Unfortunately, these types of damage are considered neglect, as warnings were given out to customers before the solar eclipse. Our LensCap insurance plan, which can be added to rentals for a small nominal fee, does not protect from neglect but is an excellent tool for those who are worried about their rental and want to protect themselves from any accidental damage.
(but perhaps not really - there are enough wiggle words in that policy that I wonder if they ever pay out on expensive damage at all: https://help.lensrentals.com/26475-damage-lenscap-protection... )
It's an interesting line, between accident and neglect. Reading the article, my initial reaction was that it is ridiculous for their insurance to not cover this damage. But yet in general I do enjoy the non-diligent actually retaining some moral hazard. This "absent agency" problem is usually addressed with a deductible, but that still doesn't fully price in the cost of easily-prevented damage.
Recently renting a box truck and not wanting to be on the hook for a $150k piece of capital equipment, I got the damage waiver. But I had wished for a cheaper policy that would have excluded damage from low drive-throughs and parking garages, which presumably makes up the majority of their claims. Alas.
That's the irony about insurance that I was pointing out. The much worse situation would have been covered.
They also don’t cover damage from Color Runs, and they’re upfront about that too.
(Although this would be a very unfair move)
