On a short jaunt in Okinawa last week, I was perplexed, upset, and disappointed to see that my trusty Tamron 17-50mm F2. lens had apparently crapped out, giving an internet-famous Err 01: Communication between the camera and lens is faulty.

I've been using this lens for a few years now, and treat all of my gear with an almost psychotic level of care. Since I had a perfectly nice Canon 28-135mm USM (gosh is USM nice) lens with me, I decided to just use that and skip on the wider shots for the rest of my trip. Today, however, I had a small bit of time to investigate.

At first, I tried cleaning the contacts on the lens and then the contacts in the camera. They were pretty spotless already, and polishing them didn't do a whole lot. I searched around on the internet a bit, and found a tip from a telescope user who said that unseating the lens might work. I had nothing better to do, so I held the lens release button, turned the lens slightly until F00 showed up on the screen (meaning that comms had been lost) and snapped a photo.

It didn't error! I snapped the lens back into place, auto-focused, then unseated again and snapped, and it worked still. Bravely, I snapped the lens back into its full seated position and took a photo without argument. Finally, I completely removed the lens, then re-attached, and it worked!

I don't know exactly what was going on here. Perhaps there was some kind of software comms issue that got reset when the camera snapped the photo with the lens unseated. Perhaps I did permanent damage to my camera by using it in this way. Perhaps there is no scientific explanation for why this worked, but my lens seems to be functioning quite readily again.

Now that my service to the internet has been completed, I'm off to TST to see if I can't snap some photos!

Dec 29 2011