Useful Tips for Keeping Your Camera Gear in Tip-Top Shape

There are a lot of obvious ways to damage your camera gear, from drops, to liquid, to dust, but did you know that it's possible to damage your gear just from having it sit around?

Photographer Ian Worth explains how a danger he didn't even think of when storing his lens was the cause for a major repair, and that got him to thinking about the other ways that beginners often harm their gear without thinking about it. He shares those mistakes in the video above.

One of the first tips Worth shares is about buying a proper camera bag. I have many different horses for many different courses, from smaller bags such as the Hex Ranger DSLR Sling that are ideal for smaller mirrorless cameras and lenses, to full backpacks, such as the HEX Back Loader DSLR Backpack V2 that can hold everything and the kitchen sink. I've also got a hard-shelled Pelican Case for travel. The reason selecting the right camera bag is so important, though, is that you need to give lenses and bodies space so that they don't rub against each other. There's nothing worse than opening a camera bag to find lenses made contact, and now, you've got a broken filter on your hands.

Which brings me to a point that Worth didn't cover, but is a good beginner tip all the same. I make it a point to put a quality filter on my lenses. After a lot of testing, I've found that B+W filters are excellent with little effect on an image, but a great effect of offering lots of protection for a lens. It's much better to simply replace a lens filter than an entire glass lens element. A filter has saved me more times than I can count. Keeping a filter on the lens also offers me the ability to leave my lens caps at home, which means I can pull the camera out of the bag and shoot faster. Finally, these filters are often required to "complete" the weather sealing on lenses that claim it.

Worth goes into more tips about how to change lenses and how to clean your sensors yourself (a process I find quite difficult but that everyone else seems to find really easy). He also shares the reason his lens was damaged even though he wasn't using it.

Check out the video above for those tips and more, and feel free to share your beginner camera care tips below in the comments.