Toronto Photography Meetup Group

This summer I'll be spending approximately 3 weeks in Europe. For a few days, I'll be at the Moto GP race in Germany. In the past, when we've gone to races I would rent a nice long lens for a few days and call it a day. However, this time around being gone for 3 weeks the lens rental charges from your typical suppliers (Vistek, etc) would add up.

Has anyone come across other options that are suitable for longer term rentals and are a bit more wallet friendly?

Buy something and then resell it after you're done.

Try negotiating with a smaller rental shop. Everything in life is negotiable

I thought about that, but doing so with a pricey lens scares me, I'm looking at lenses in the 300-500mm range

Make friends with a "gearhead" and borrow his stuff.

But seriously I would buy a used L quality lens and sell it afterwards. Quality lenses hold their value very well and if you buy used you will probably not lose much, if at all.

Is there any camera shop that rent stuffs in Germany? Then you don't need to rent for the whole duration of the trip.

just came across this site.

http://www.lenslenders.com/index.php

Eddie

This has been discussed before: http://www.tpmg.ca/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13895&highlight=lens+rental

If you need this lens for more than 3-4 weeks it is cheaper to buy a new/used one and sell it later.

+1

Too bad we don't have services like www.borrowlens.com in Canada. I don't know if they will loan lenses to Canadians. They bought my 70-200 off me to add to their rental inventory.

www.borrowlens.com refers their Canadain customers to lenslenders.com as they don't want to deal with customs issues.

Very interesting. I like the fact that these guys have a significantly lower price for successive weeks beyond the 1st week.

Thanks!

Possible. I hadn't thought about it since the race isn't near a metropolitan area. I'll do some research on that. Thanks for the suggestion.

Ahhhh, good to know.

I just returned from California where I rented a digital body from borrowlens. I had to use my mother's in law name, CC, and address but aside from that, everything went smoothly and if you can do the same, and ever need to rent while in the States, I really recommend them. The camera arrived one day earlier which is of course not charged and they were very responsive to all the questions I had along the way. They send you a prepaid shipping box which you drop off at Fedex when you're done and then they even emailed me to confirm that all went well, before i even had a chance to ask them if they received it on time.
All in all, a really good experience.

FYI, you can use lensrentals.com as well, and have them ship to a UPS store/depot (which are everywhere). They even mention this on their website.

Thank you, that's good to know, KL. I really needed a 2nd body and was glad that everything worked out well.