R-Bac Photography

The weather here in NE BC has been absolutely horrible this past few weeks. On the rare accession that the sun pokes its head out I always seem to be previously occupied or not ready to shoot. On the subject of the latter, I have been getting some excellent advise from some of the talented members of BPN forums on long lens issues when shooting in cold weather. My suspicions were true, although I had no idea how problematic it can really be. One gentleman from New Brunswick went so far as to say he gets "universally poor results" trying to get grab shots from a warm vehicle such as I was trying. I went a step further than some of the suggestions on testing and kept a record of how long it took for the lens to "equilibrate" (learned some new words, too!) I set up a shot outdoors at a stationary subject and shot every five minutes until I saw the images clearly and not appearing to get any clearer. For my situation, in a modest -10c environment, it seemed that 1/2 an hour was sufficient. (I am going to repeat the test on a beanbag as the tripod and gimbal head still displayed some movement in the wind. This made it difficult to see when the shimmer was gone thru live view at maximum zoom)
As for a photo for today, I'm sure that no one wants to see spider lens cal shot thru heat shimmer, so I'll post another RedPoll, I'm sure my wife-and the cat-will be thrilled.