Japan Photo Guide

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Seeing how it is now the middle of winter for us northern hemisphere people, I thought I should give a little advice on photography in the winter…actually to be more specific I wanna talk about camera care during the winter. Taking some precautions to take care of your camera in the winter is very important and a few simple things can keep you from causing serious–and sometimes permanent– damage to your camera.

The first thing you should be aware of is that cold weather will reduce your battery life (sometimes drastically), so not only should you have a spare battery but you may want to carry your battery charger with you at all times when traveling. Nothing is more frustrating than missing a great shot because the batteries are dead! Another type about battery life, if you know you will not be using your camera for an extended period of time (while you are sleeping for example) take your batteries out of your camera because even if your camera is turned off, the contact in the camera will slowly but surely drain your batteries!

While having dead batteries is annoying, a more serious problem is condensation. This could happen when you come inside to a heated room after you have been outside in cold weather. There are a couple of things you can do to help reduce the chances of this happening. Put your camera in a zip lock plastic bag before going inside to help prevent condensation from forming inside your camera (instead, condensation might form on the bag itself). Another way to prevent condensation is to bring the camera into a room that does not have heating first and let it adjust to that temperature so there is not such a drastic change in temperature. If you have a reason to believe that condensation has formed in your camera, take out the battery and memory card and leave the doors to your camera open to let it dry out.

When leaving a hot room to go outside into the cold, there isn’t as much to worry about, but you still need to be careful of condensation or water. If there is condensation in your camera and you go outside to very cold weather, if this condensation freezes it will result in permanent damage and most likely the use of some 4 letter words.

Those are pretty much the main things to consider while doing winter photography, but if anyone else has some tips please leave a comment!

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