During a day-long shoot, of course. Well, I didn't drop it; the camera with lens attached and zoomed all the way in was sitting on something which was apparently less stable than it looked. I had to go check on something my assistant was having trouble printing. Sinking feeling as I heard the crash on the other side of the room :-( The camera, thank heaven, seems absolutely fine. The lens (my 28-300) will zoom from 300-120 or so and then gets physically stuck. The lens lock is not on; I checked ;-) Besides, that only engages at 28, which I can't get anywhere near. Good thing I brought a backup lens, eh?
Posting in the forlorn hope someone else has done something similar and figured out a way to fix it without sending it off to a factory and spending megabucks. I was really hoping I would wake up this morning and find out it had magically fixed itself overnight. No such luck.
Oh, and the shoot was a charity event. No good deed goes unpunished LOL.
Look deeply into the meaning of this incident. Something is telling you to keep your distance. You've been getting too close to people. Don't question it, simply accept it as a sign and embrace it with a 120mm pole.
That's a tough one. To me it looks like it's going to be a ship it out for rebuild kind of event. At least you have a good attitude about it, and you understand that stressing out can't help much.
In NM on 06, I allowed a usb cable to pull my Fuji S3 Pro off a table. Fortunately, it still worked fine for the rest of the trip and for about a month, but then, I literally "let the white smoke out of it", and had to send it out to have it repacked with fresh white smoke, for a price of around $400.
This sort of thing is one emotional step below having your gear stolen.
