I can think of a few equipment failures, and coincidentally they all happened on my trips to Coney Island last year.
The most serious, and frustrating, was also a no-battery situation. My little rangefinder runs on small coin cells, so I dutifully changed them for fresh batteries before I left for the day. And didn't bother bringing spares. Of course this is when I discover that the big-brand batteries that I'm using are bad, because they fail after nine rolls of film.
Good batteries should last for fifty.
At this point it was nearing the end of the day, but it was still going to cost me a couple of hours of very scarce shooting time. But I got incredibly lucky, and one of the nearby convenience stores actually had a pair of the odd type that I needed. It still took about half and hour, and caused stress that I didn't need, but I went on to take three more rolls of film.
The other gear failure happened on an earlier day trip to the same bit of boardwalk. My Hasselblad jammed, which is a nuisance but not an unexpected one, so I was carrying the tools I needed to reset it. The bigger problem was the toll the long day took on my tripod, because after a few hours one of the legs started to loosen. It held together, but by the end of the trip it was quite wobbly and I had to take extra care carrying it and setting it up. Naturally, it's held together with Torx screws, making it very difficult to fix in the field. That experience has added an extra gear-check step to my travel planning, but there was nothing I could do about it at the time.
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I'm very reluctant to post this... but in 30 years of photography, I have never suffered a failure in gear, film or batteries.....
The carbon unit on my cameras (that bit just behind the viewfinder) has failed many times...
I've never had gear fail me when I needed it.
But things like batteries ..or having put the camera in the zip up backpack, the eagle turns round and poses for ten seconds 4 feet away, before disappearing for good. Or having wrong settings from a previous shoot.
Lumix LX5.
Canon 350 D.+ 18-55 Kit lens + Tamron 70-300 macro. + Canon 50mm f1.8 + Manfrotto tripod, in bag.
Yes, I too confess of hi-tech kit defeated by a lo-tech enemy(!): it's always my battery(ies), whose behaviour is/are totally without logic; I invariably then order a cheapo one, which behaves as inscrutably as the previous one and sets me to muttering. I then swear I'll buy a decent one next time....
I did also have the self-loosening tripod that Matthew mentioned...
.... My tripod, I am convinced, is possessed of sapient life: all screws are "shipshape and Bristol fashion" until such time as its use is absolutely necessary. Then, just at the furthest non-returnable part of a journey(in Wales or Italy, say), it starts to outgrow its screws. Now, far from Zig to go floppy in the field, as 'twere: a screwdriver or adjustment tool is thus now permantly gaffer-taped to one of its legs.
Other than that, I can't remember ever having failure of things photographical...unless one counts a lovely old Fuji twin-focal length film compact I had: lens smashed, viewfinder trashed......I must add that this was after it had been thrown at me by ex-Mrs Zig. However, such was the build, brawn and sturdiness of the Fuji that it functioned perfectly thereafter...a fact I felt wise to censor at the time....
