Best place to rent a body and lens

Have you tried to get in touch with any of the local places to see if they rent bodies and lenses? I would tell you to probably go with a local shop if they do since you have a local contact as opposed to someone who knows where – which is not to say that the rental company you mention is bad, just that I would rather deal with someone local.

In terms of the money side of it, I know that you said it’s going to be tough to put down $1K right now; however, if you are investing $300 - $400 possibly more in renting a body and lens(es), it might be worth it for you to hold off on it or pull some money together. It would seem a waste to me to pay that much to rent equipment for 10 days only to turn around a few weeks or months later and have to pay that again to buy the equipment.

In terms of the lenses, I’m a lifelong Canon shooter so I’ll let the Nikon shooters guide you in a better direction in terms of renting/buying lenses for what you need. One thing you’ll need to figure out though is whether you are planning on shooting landscapes, detail shorts (e.g. leaves, flowers, bugs), portraits, or all the above.

Scott Bourne mini-reviewed Pro Photo Rental back in May. He seemed impressed. I have been meaning to give them a try, but haven't had need to do so this summer.

I don't have a local shop to rent from, so online is my only option. You will probably have multiple local choices up in the Seattle area, but here is a second online option to look at.

http://photofocus.com/2009/05/27/a-mini-review-of-pro-photo-rental/

http://www.prophotorental.com/categories.asp?cid=2

I have heard good things about Lensrentals.com I have never personally used a rental shop before though.

Personally, I would advise against renting a completely new setup for a vacation (unless you rent it a week early to get used to it). You will spend much of your vacation time fiddling with the camera and figuring out how to take great pictures with it. If you had a body you were used to and just renting a lens, I'd say go for it, but a completely new setup can take a lot of time away from your vacation.

If you avoid the rental, you are already almost a quarter of the way towards the purchase. Normally I recommend rentals to people when they need a lens or body that they won't use often. If they are planning on using it a lot in the future, I recommend saving and buying. These are just my opinions and obviously everybody has different priorities though. Have fun and good luck.

Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were referring to the price of an individual piece of the package (e.g. a lens or body) when you were talking about the $200.

Do you think the 18-70 is going to do what you need it to or are you going to need a bigger lineup of lenses? If the former is true, I would probably say $200 isn’t that bad – although I would still rather put it towards buying a package myself – and I would go for it maybe a few days before you all leave so she can play around with the settings as others mentioned above.

jdechko said:

Just looked at your website... awesome pics, especially at the OBX. My wife's family is from NC, and she was born in Dunn. I'm a GA boy. We hope to go the Aquarium when we're in Atlanta, too.

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Thank you for the compliments! Some of those OBX pics are actually being featured in this year’s Official Tourism Guide for the Outer Banks. It will be interesting to see which ones they choose – I submitted around ten different ones.

You definitely need to check out the Georgia Aquarium, my wife and I are aquarium buffs and we’ve traveled throughout the US and even over to Mexico to visit different aquariums – it’s one of those funny things we both enjoy! The Georgia Aquarium though, BY FAR, is the best aquarium we’ve visited and we’ve been there three times and will probably be going in the next year or so when they open their dolphin exhibit. One thing I would recommend though is doing the Behind the Scenes Tour – it’s a little pricey, I want to say it was around $50-$60 in addition to the tickets – but it was well worth it because you got to see everything that ran the aquarium plus get close up to the animals at the top of the tanks. I very badly want to swim with the whale sharks in the tank but I understand they are booked for the next few years, ah well what are you going to do?