The recent -40c weather has been teaching me even more about cold weather shooting since I last posted about it. The other day I went cruising for some wildlife, just me and the 600 sitting contently on the passenger seat. We have a decent population of Northern Hawk Owls up here in Altares, and I was scoping out some of the more common places to find them. Sure enough, One little fellow was where he should be, with some awesome late afternoon sun on him, and to boot, an angry Raven was giving him the what-for from the branch above him. I rolled down the window, threw up the bean bag and blazed away. To make a long story short, they sucked. Soft across the entire frame. Not just a little soft, either- Total garbage! I re-checked my settings, all good. Lots of shutter speed. I've shot with the 1DmkIII all day on the ski hill with amazing results, so I knew it wasn't the camera in cold weather. It slowly dawned on me that the Buick on the seat beside me masquerading as a lens was roughly 20 times bigger than any of my other glass, and probably has it's own atmosphere with the amount of space inside that lens body.
A quick internet search confirmed this, with many shooters lamenting their weekends of driving around with the heat off so that the gear is correctly acclimated. As much as it hurt to do so, I banished said Buick to the backseat of the truck to "chill" while I went back to work. Two hours later, I popped in a warm battery and CF card and proceeded to shoot. I came away from the experiment with two new lessons well learned. First, and most importantly-gotta let the big glass acclimate . Secondly, and almost equally as important, is that Lenscoat makes neoprene lens covers for a very good reason. On that note, I'm off to order one.
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