Winter time and camera gear

It was -24 C in Finland during my xmas holiday there but it did not prevent me from photographing. Cold weather like that just requires some preparations. The most important one for your gear is to prevent condensation.

Condensation happens when cold camera is brought indoors. Fog appears on lens surfaces etc and that moist can damage your camera internals as well. Preventing condensation is simple. You need put a camera inside a plastic bag before entering indoors. Wrapping camera inside a bag prevents the warm and moist air reaching the cold surfaces of the camera. Take the wrapped camera indoors and wait half an hour or so to let the camera to warm up.

Cold weather affects camera and accessory batteries as well. In cold they do not hold their charge well and you end up running out of battery sooner. Have an extra battery and store it inside your coat to keep it warm. When the cold camera battery runs out of juice, swap it with the warm one. You should be able to get some extra shots from the empty one after it has warmed up. Do not put the camera inside your coat because of condensation issue.

Especially with older manual lenses the lubrication used in the gears gets stiff in freezing temperatures. There is not much you can do without putting the whole lens apart. Modern lenses use synthetic lubricants and they are not that prone to get stiff. But modern equipment has a lot of plastic parts and some plastics become very brittle in freezing conditions. So be extra careful.

Last but not least is your own body. Keep your fingers and head warm!

Holiday camera gear

We came back home after two weeks in Hungary and Romania. It was a holiday after all so we did not pack every possible piece of a camera gear with us. The airline restrictions prevented it.

The main parts of the camera gear were Canon 450D and 550D bodies. For them we had three lenses. EF-S 18-55mm IS kit lens, EF 70-200mm f4 L IS USM and Vivitar M42 35mm f1.9 prime. We also had set of extension tubes, Canon 430EX II flash, radio triggers, YN-460II flash, SLR Zoom GorillaPod, Manfrotto 745XB tripod with 701 RC2 fluid head, batteries, filters, chargers and some random bits and pieces. Most of this was inside or attached to Lowepro Primus AW backpack. Only the camera with 18-55mm lens was in a separate small bag.

So, what was necessary? Most I would say. We did not use extension tubes or YN-460II flash for some reason. Everything else was used and I don't think we were missing anything else except couple more memory cards. I left the tripod in the car trunk quite often but every time we left the car we took all the rest of the camera gear with us.

We had 2x16Gb cards for 550D and 4Gb+8Gb for 450D. Unfortunately that was not enough for RAW photos so we had to switch to JPEG. That has caused some issues in post processing but most of the photos seem to be fine. There is still good amount of material to sort and video to cut... I think I would need another holiday just for that.