This particular time, I was in the middle of moving from California to Idaho. We had all of our stuff in a uhaul trailer in the parking lot of the temple as I was shooting the wedding. Well, for a variety of reasons, this situation caused some problems with what I would "normally" do.I started looking on line for a Netflix for cameras or something. I came across a few sites that offer various things, but one really stuck out. www.lensrentals.com claims to be a photographer's co-op. All the proceeds of the rentals go into news lenses and camera bodies. Thats all fine and dandy, but what I was really interested in was getting the lenses in good condition, on time and for a good price. I needed the lenses for the 22nd, so I ordered them to show up for the 19th. You have two options with lensrentals, you can choose a date to have them ship to you or you can just ask to have them ship the lens when it becomes available. I reserved two lenses for 7 days starting on the 19th. I received the package at work (you need to sign for it, it ships UPS) a week early. I emailed lensrentals just to make sure that I wasn't going to pay extra and got a response within an hour that they are just paranoid and knew I needed the lens for an important shoot and wanted to get it there early.
So even though had the lenses for two weeks, I only reserved them for a week and only paid for a week. I rented the Canon 10-22mm and the Tameron 28-70mm which I will right reviews of later. They showed up in a small box packed with what seemed to be memory foam. Each lens had a carrying case and the wide angle had a lens hood. Shipping both ways is included in price and they even enclose a return address label in the package. In total the cost was $88. This seems like a lot of money, but truly, its not. I had two lenses for 14 days. This is $3.14 per lens per day including shipping. On top of that, renting certain lenses that you aren't going to shoot on every day makes a lot more sense than buying them (espesially the "L" series lenses they offer). I've also heard my friend lament that he wishes that he would have rented his macro lens before buying it. Even though the reviews all gave 5 stars, he hates that lens and dropped a grand on it. I'll be renting any lens I'm thinking of buying from now on... and since I'll be in the middle of nowhere Idaho, I'll probably do that with LensRentals.com.
Their selection is fantastic for both Canon and Nikon shooters. They have the lenses categorized in helpful groups like tele, standard, wide, macro, etc. "Roger" also adds his two cents on some of the lenses, which is helpful if you don't feel like searching amazon or bhphoto for reviews. They even have rack mounts, ball heads, camera bodies, pocket wizards, and other randomness.
All in all I found the service to be fantastic and quick, the prices to be reasonable and the website/ordering process to be very straight forward. I will continue to rent from them for some time as I am moving to an area of no real photo shops.
