Sony DSLR A900 at Dakar Rally

Whether you are in Argentina or Chile, January is the middle of summer. It is dry and dust is always everywhere. Driving through Pampas and Patagonia, you find your way among stones, bushes and ?grass? that can wreck your car if you happen to hit it. Therefore, you drive on the route one vehicle after another. When you realize that we had to cover at least 500 kilometers and sometimes even 800 kilometers each day, you will understand why that was no picnic. Generally, you had to drive fast. Every vehicle was followed by an enormous cloud of sand and a four-wheel truck, at over 100 km per hour, looked like Halley?s Comet. Just imagine following a truck like that for a few hours. The windows and the air vents were closed, but sand was everywhere ? in our mouths, eyes, in the camera bag and even under lens covers.

Fot.: Jacek Bonecki

Fot.: Jacek Bonecki

As I wrote earlier, sometimes I just had to stop and take a photo... but after a truck passed us, for a few minutes we couldn?t even see our own shoes. And the Sony DSLR A900 worked in those conditions. Another example is choppers taking off. They can be a nuisance, but the DSLR A900 had to cope with that as well. At one point, I decided to travel on the platform of my pick-up truck for a short distance in the Andes. Just a few dozen kilometers. At times, I couldn?t see anything but the dust and I didn?t even dare to open my eyes, not to mention turn on the camera hidden under my fleece jacket. Even when visibility was relatively good, I still felt as if someone was shoveling flour in my face.

Fot.: Jacek Bonecki

Fot.: Jacek Bonecki

I was not bothered with plastic bags on the camera, wrapping the camera bag in trash bags, etc. One, there was no time to do that, and two, I myself dislike plastic protectors. Let?s not be paranoid. This is not why professional equipment costs so much.  Besides, I?m not the pedantic type; for me, photography equals action, timing, being there. And not wrapping the equipment neatly in all that plastic and unwrapping it when a  photo opportunity materializes. I run, shoot, reload, aim and shoot again. I don?t, and I don?t want to, think about anything else other than what and how I shoot photos. It is like a war: you are thinking about survival. Except that my ?war? is exuberant and beautiful.
 

Fot.: Jacek Bonecki

Fot.: Jacek Bonecki

But nothing went wrong. The camera worked as it should. Every night, I used an air compressor to return the color of the Sony DSLR A900 to black. Everything was great, there were no grinding noises, nothing was freezing, the buttons and wheels worked without any problems. The sensor and the focusing screen is anentirely different story. They did have to get dirty. Especially that, against logic, I often changed lenses at the worst moment... when something was always in the air. But well... I like using different lenses, and as I have already said, I had no time to wait for a better moment.
 

But I did have an ace up my sleeve, actually in a plastic bag. A sealed and ?dust free? enema bulb. That is what I used to clean the sensor in the quiet of my hotel room. It  worked. I did not have do it very often because I frequently cleaned the sensor using the menu function. Only for the larger particles, I had to use my hands and the bulb. I should also add that the resolution of the Sony DSLR A900 display does allow us to see whether or not the sensor is dirty. I didn?t have to use a computer for that.
 
Only once did the camera display a message that something was wrong. It turned out that an aperture cam jammed. As a result, the aperture did not open all the way. But I am too old for tricks like that. I attached the lens, pushed the cam with my finger and the problem vanished. That was the only issue that I experienced in that dust factory. Actually, there were also some esthetic matters ? not everyone likes to work using equipment so dirty as this one. Unfortunately, you have no choice during the Dakar Rally. Just as taxes are a necessary companion of being a citizen of a state. Fighting is aimless. A man can be helped with a shower in the evening, but a camera? Wash it... ?