I Finally got my camera and lens back in working order. Well, more or less. There are still a couple of minor problems, but at least it still takes pictures which is more than I thought it would ever do after it fell in the water. This was taken last night inside an inspection shaft for the island of Montreal’s interceptor network. The sewer at the bottom is roughly six storeys below grade and runs directly into the island’s wastewater treatment plant. Put another way: it’s nothing we’d ever dare try and wade through. Besides, these shafts are probably the most interesting thing about the system.

Oh yeah, and a proper update’s coming soon.

What three seconds underwater will do to a DSLR.

So this is what happens when your Canon 30D decides to take a photo one second after falling into three feet of water/sewage. Kind of pretty, isn’t it? Unfortunately I wasn’t really going for the experimental look, though. This was bound to happen eventually since I’m constantly pushing the limits of what my tripod is capable of handling. The water in this stretch wasn’t flowing particularly fast, but I guess it was deep enough to cause some instability when I wasn’t keeping an eye on things.

Since last night I’ve applied a number of extreme measures to help save the camera including dunking it in distilled water, rinsing it out with isopropyl alcohol. My lens, which is probably worth more than the camera itself at this point, doesn’t look very good right now either, but hopefully some silica gel packets (if I can find them) will help clear out the fog and microbe infested water droplets inside.

In other (better) news, a podcast segment I did for Spacing Magazine about exploring the sewers of Montreal was put online today.

I also found out that I’ll be working as a designer for Rafael Lozano-Hemmer‘s studio here in Montreal which I couldn’t be more excited about.

So basically other than the camera thing, life is pretty good.

Update: The camera’s  functioning again except for the LCD screen, but I think that can probably be replaced easily enough. The important thing is that it’s still able to take pictures and write to the memory card. I was also able to get all the water out of the lens by dismantling it as much as I could and running a hairdryer through it for about half an hour. And to think I almost sent it off to the manufacturer to be repaired..