BorrowLenses.com - Renting a Lens (part 1)

I've heard nothing but rave reviews about BorrowLenses.com, but until today, I hadn't actually utilized there service. I decided this morning that a circular fisheye lens might be a fun addition to my bag for our upcoming trip to Baltimore's Inner Harbor, so what better reason to rent a lens and share with you the entire process. My goal is to have a lens by this Saturday, June 13th. (that's 4 days away) Let's see how it goes...

BorrowLenses.com is a very simple, easy to navigate website. You'll find all the categories of equipment they rent listed down the left side of the screen. In a world where bell and whistles, fancy animations, and all sorts of other useless gimmicks, bog down many ecommerce websites, I found this site refreshing.

Here we see the offerings under the "Nikon->Fisheye Lenses" category. Another thing I'd like to point out about BorrowLenses is the pricing structure. (Shown below) For someone out of town, I'm able to rent a lens for anywhere from one to four weeks. I'm interested in the Sigma 8mm fisheye, which we see is "Available".

As I mentioned earlier, the pricing is extremely reasonable. I went to B&H and found that this lens retails for $899. For a fisheye, a lens that doesn't get used very often, it becomes very apparent the usefulness of this service from a financial standpoint. At $100 for 4 weeks (there's a price break the longer you rent a lens), you could rent this particular lens for 36 weeks before you break even by purchasing it!

After selecting a 1 week rental, and adding insurance (you can see what it covers, here), you simply add the lens to your cart.

Signing up for an account was easy. You just provide the normal email address, shipping address, etc and your account is created. 

The next step in this phase of the process involves choosing your shipping options. BorrowLenses offers local pickup in the San Francisco Bay area, and 1-Day and 2-Day FedEx shipping everywhere else in the US. I chose the 2-Day option with a requested delivery date of 6/11 (this coming Thursday). The cost was $26 which also includes the return shipping cost for when I'm finished with the lens.

I'm really impressed with how simple the process was at this point. More to come when the lens gets here...

UPDATE: Apparently, great minds think alike. ;-) I was just catching up on my favorite blogs and found that Jeff Revell over at PhotoWalkPro did a great write-up on fisheye lenses yesterday. Definitely worth the read, you can find it here.

If you're interested here are links to Part 2 and Part 3 of this series.