Photography - Accidents & Equipment Insurance

Having acquired all your nice expensive equipment, you may want to insure it against damage and flooding. Alright, perhaps not a cheap film camera, but a high-end housed 35mm, digital, or video camera certainly deserves the protection. On the other hand, with proper care and maintenance, and attention to detail when sealing it up, a modern camera housing is extremely unlikely to leak.

Here's something I learned the hard way:

Batteries + saltwater = one really nasty corrosive mess. Regular old alkalines are not nearly as destructive when you get them wet. What does this mean? Use NiMH batteries in the camera inside the housing, but use alkalines inside your strobes, so that if the battery compartment does flood, you can just rinse it out with fresh water and maybe lemon juice. The result of a wet NiMH battery will eat away the metal contacts of the battery compartment so fast that by the time you can do anything about it, it's too late. Alkaline batteries have plenty of oomph to drive a strobe, although not a camera. If your camera housing floods, the battery type won't really matter, since the saltwater will destroy the camera all by itself.


Scup (Porgy)

Stentotomus chrysops

Profile by Stacey Reap

Range:
Scup have been found along the Atlantic coast from the Bay of Fundy and Sable Island Bank, Canada, to as far south as Florida; however, the greatest concentrations can be found from Massachusetts to North Carolina. Depending upon the season, they can be found from coastal waters and estuaries out to depths of approximately 650 ft. along the outer continental shelf. A separate population of scup referred to as the "southern porgy" or S. aculeatus, is referenced in several South Atlantic Bight studies; however, there is no official differentiation made between the two populations by the American Fisheries Society.