insurance

Home insurance companies are secretly taking photos of private residences with drones, surveillance balloons, and even manned planes to find reasons to drop you as a customer.

Photographers of all skill levels should strongly consider insuring their camera equipment. Whether you are an amateur who cannot afford to replace damaged to stolen gear or a working professional who cannot risk missing out on paying jobs, you should consider protecting your equipment with photography insurance and/or camera insurance.

Last year, peer-to-peer rental services KitSplit and ShareGrid both announced a nearly identical "Owner Guarantee" that protected users in case someone they've rented to walks away with up to $20,000 of gear. However, it seems ShareGrid has quietly suspended the policy due to COVID-19.

Photography is amazing, but it does require gear. I recently moved from Canon to Sony, so I had to offload a camera body, lenses, flashes, and triggers. I purchased out-of-pocket insurance on all of my gear packages just to have some peace-of-mind.

Want general liability insurance as a photographer but don't want to pay monthly premiums because your shoots aren't very regular? Verifly can provide you with insurance on a per-shoot basis, covering you for millions in exchange for dollars on the hour.

Even though everybody knows how important it is to insure their photography gear, few people ever get organized enough to actually do it. It's just too much of a pain in the rear... well, it was. A new app called MyGearVault makes organizing and insuring your gear so easy, you're out of excuses.

Dear photography community, I am writing this blog post to warn you from an experience I had in getting my camera stolen from a car, and then finding that my insurance refused to cover it.

If you're getting into drone photography and you don't want to end up paying for someone's roof or head injury in case of an accident, you might want to look into Verifly. A drone insurance company, they offer $1,000,000 in coverage that you can buy by the hour so you're only insured when you fly.

If you're an aerial photographer making a living with your camera drone, it might be a good idea to get it insured. Good news: AIG is now selling insurance that's specifically designed with drone operators in mind.

Whether you are a working professional or a passionate enthusiast, keeping your gear up to date can cost a pretty penny. For this reason, you want to ensure that all of your equipment is well protected against possible damage or theft. With many different organizations offering customized insurance plans for your gear, we are going to take a look at five options to see which may be best suited to your needs.

Photographer and entrepreneur Gary Fong lost his house to a devastating fire earlier this year, but he didn't lose any of his most valued possessions thanks to precautions that he took. After the experience, he realized that cinder blocks can be used as a cheap way for photographers to gain some fire protection for their data without having to shell out big bucks for commercial solutions.

If you’ve invested any significant amount of money in your camera gear, it’s a good idea to make sure …

Reason number 14,526 why you should insure your gear: because a rowdy bunch of over-excited Croatian high school grads might just push you into a freezing fountain and destroy it all.

This might seem like an unlikely scenario (which is why it's so far down the list) but it actually happened earlier this month to one poor Croatian photojournalist, and the incident was caught on camera.

Just incase @29_JL @hullcityteam your not sure the ball is the yellow thing.... not the £6k camera (photo al walter) pic.twitter.com/op6zGrUBVX— Richard Heathcote (@rheathcote) December 21, 2013

Professional sports photographers know their equipment is always at risk, but British Getty Images shooter Richard Heathcote was still surprised and more than a bit miffed when his DSLR bit the dust at Saturday's Hull-vs.-West Bromwich Premiere League soccer match.

Let's not kid ourselves, when it comes to health insurance, freelance photographers are in an unfortunate situation. Despite working long hours like everyone else and managing their own business, freelance photographers don't get the same group rates that regular employees do. There is no question that buying insurance as an individual is more expensive.

According to a recent analysis of its 2012 wedding insurance claims, Travelers Insurance cites the photographer as the most common cause of wedding day mishaps. In its breakdown of the numbers, 24 percent of all wedding issues (the largest chunk) were vendor-related, and 58 percent of all the claims filed under that category involved photos or video.

Depending on your subject matter, it can be a very good idea to take out a damage waiver when renting camera equipment. Wildlife photographer Andrew Kane learned this recently after renting gear from LensRentals for a shoot in Yellowstone. Here's his account of how the borrowed equipment ended up broken:

I recently rented a D4, Wimberly head, and 600VR from you, and the day before yesterday, I had a little bit of an accident. I was photographing a coyote here in Yellowstone and I followed it into the woods about 300yds away from the road. As I am taking pictures of the coyote, I heard twigs breaking behind me, and as I turned around I saw it was a grizzly bear. I picked up the tripod with the D4 and 600 on it and slowly started to back away. The bear got closer and closer as I tried to back up. When the bear got to within 20 yds. of me, I bumped into a brush pile that I could not lift the tripod over, so I had no choice but to leave the gear and continue away from the bear.

Last week we reported on how photographers and a magazine are being sued for $300,000 for allegedly …

Here’s a good example of why photographers should think about carrying liability insurance: …