What, do you think everyone living around the 49th and northwards keeps their cameras inside for half a year?
I don't remember how cold and windy it was (easily -20C or colder), but the adjective I would use is "fricken'".
You really only need to know three things:
1. Bring spare batteries and keep them warm. They won't last long in the camera
2. Let your gear acclimate, for several hours, in a closed bag when you bring it inside (the gear should be inside the bag before you bring it indoors)
3. Don't breath in the direction of your gear, or your breath will condense and freeze onto the gear, making it a pain to use.
To all you living in the super-cold locations...isn't it miserable? It got down to about 10F here last night, and our pipes froze...landlord just finished thawing them out.
No, we build things properly here.
I was able to use a D200 in -50 deg (C or F it's about the same) for about an hour. One battery was in my pocket on my inside set of pants, and the other in the battery. These died within 10-15 minutes in the camera, but came back to life in my pocket.
Within 30min autofocus failed in the lens for various focal distances. The focusing ring was incredibly stiff, but could still be moved by hand. The LCD on the top of my camera became useless. The crystals froze and didn't change so I had to look through the viewfinder to see what the settings were in the internal LCD.
The back LCD also showed signs of stress. The highlight blink feature no longer blinked black and white as much as subtly drifted between shades of middle grey. Switching from one image to the next took about 1-2 seconds for the LCD to reach a stable colour value. This was pretty bad but didn't seem to get any worse.
At about the 45min mark the mirror return made a noticably different and much slower slapping noise. Also i accidentally sighed while taking a photo instantly frosting over the lens. I had a filter on so that was removed and I was good to go again.
An hour in I was taking photos and my shutter jammed and the LCD only just managed to change enough digits for me to make out [ERR]. I smacked my camera around a bit till I heard a click and then cycled the power and was good to go again. Except 4 shots later it jammed again. I tried putting my camera under my coat (god it was cold), and I heard the shutter release when I cycled the power after ten min. Yay good to go again. Then I pulled the camera out of my coat and it instantly frosted over bright white. Lens ring buttons everything wasn't moving and I called it quits.
Camera recovered sitting in the car under the heater within the hour.
Yep, that sounds about right.
Well... you know in Canada we all sit in circle around the bonfire in the middle of the tipi. At night we wrap ourself in wapiti skins and get close to eachother avoiding losing heat as much as possible!
Don't listen to this guy, he's trying to trick you.
We live in igloos in winter, duh...
