I broke my 5D tonight. I did it. I was trying out a new DIY lens idea that I’ve had brewing for a long time. The lens idea worked fine, but I did something stupid while testing it. I had a small piece of newspaper near the lens mount and I guess it got caught on the mirror and hit the shutter.
One of the shutter blades kinked and became torn where it mounts to the motor that moves it. It is temporarily toast. I’ll describe the gruesome details below…
OK, so here’s the deal. I tested the DIY lens apparatus, and it was working OK, but it had a lot of light leaks. This image looks so orange and soft, because part of the device is made of a think yellow plastic. It was allowing a lot of light to sneak inside. It’s actually a pretty cool effect, but not what I was looking for.
So, instead of spray painting the plastic flat black or securing something light proof to it, I ripped off a piece of newspaper and covered it. It worked fine when i tested it with some tilt/shift in this pic.
Now for the moment of truth (aka – the $300 mistake). I accidentally let a corner of the newsprint slip inside my camera body. It hit the mirror, and it must’ve hit the shutter blades. This is the image I got – along with a strange noise and an error code.
Everything seemed to be working fine, and I didn’t think anything of the mistake. This picture looked “almost” normal. I say almost, because you see a tiny bright spot in the upper right corner of the pic.
Then it got worse. Now I get the horrible bright corner, which I eventually figured out was torn shutter blade. Not good. Not good at all.
I found a recent thread online about replacing the shutter in the 5D and a few people have been quoted right at $300 from Canon. I guess everyone makes mistakes, but do they have to be $300 mistakes?