Valuable Tip: Remove Your Batteries

For fear of batteries leaking, I'm good about removing batteries from devices that I store for long periods of time. I haven't bothered, however, to remove them from devices that I use regularly or irregularly -- and this recently caught up with me. I have two Nikon SB800 flashes. I use one as my primary flash and the other as a backup. When I went to check the batteries in my backup flash, they had leaked, badly! Since a replacement flash costs in the neighborhood of $500.00, this could have been a major problem. Thankfully, I was able to clean up the mess and get the flash working again. But from now on, I remove batteries from everything I'm not using, especially my most critical (and expensive) cameras and accessories. A word to the wise.