Protecting the camera-body when changing lenses

I like travelling a lot and was wondering if anyone had a solution to the following problem:

Every time you change the lens, the camera-body is opened up and dirt can get onto the mirror and into the camera-body. Especially when travelling in sandy areas this is pretty dangerous for the gear.

My solution for this in the past was to use a zoom-lens (Nikon 18-200), avoiding lens change at all. But since fixed focal-lengh lenses have a much better quality than zoom-lenses I was wondering if there is a solution like the following:

Has anyone ever heard of protection-lenses connecting-through the lens-contacts? This lens could be mounted between the camera-body and the fixed focal-lenght lens. If a fixed focal-lengh lens is going to be changed, it is taken off the protection lens which stays on the camera body, thus protecting it from dirt to get in. Of course the picture quality would be decreased a bit but maybe it is better to use this combination than using a zoom-lens.

Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

Dilithium

Attached Images

protectionlens.jpg (13.2 KB, 5 views)

Hi,

This is indeed a good idea The only available "protection-lenses" I know are tele converters, e.g. like the 1.4 or 2.0 ones, which extend your reach accordingly. However you will loose 1 stop with the 1.4 and 2 stops with the 2.0. Besides the image quality will normally degrade as well.

If you are using primes, you normally would like to get the best possible quality, so putting some pieces of glass, which degrade your picture quality is not that optimal. Nowadays high quality zooms like Canon´s L-lenses or Nikon´s G series are qualitywise really close to primes. Besides they are enviromental sealed. Maybe this is a more viable option ? - except these lenses are unfortunately real real expensive

No matter how careful you are sooner or later your carema will accumulate dusts. The most effective method for removing dust I know is using a blower to blow away the dust particles. For more stubborn stuffs, wet cleaning is my next option. Otherwise you can also let the your camera cleaned by professional services.

Recently some camera manufacturers have implemented dust shakers into their cameras, but according to certain reviews, the only real effective solution is Olympus' one... hmm.. I guess my blower will still have plenty to do

Cheers