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Trying to keep lenses from fogging in the winter.

H

harmonica44

I have a short I am planning on shooting outdoors, soon, the only problem is, is that it's cold outside and I am having problems with the lenses fogging. Do I just do a take until it fogs, then say cut, and wipe it off and continue each time, or is their a better way?

Thanks.
 
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Open the bags and let the gear acclimatize to the temperature for a while before the shoot. If you go outdoors to indoors or vice versa with heating or AC it'll need some time. Like a car window or similar.

You can also pull any filters off the lens to help the process.
 
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pEMS1-6237047venh.jpg


Spit works well, too!!!


As PG said, let your equipment acclimatize to prevent fogging inside the camera.
 
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In the past two years of high school yearbook I've worked with the same photography studio that does the official pictures... when we go to schools during the winter season (or if it's just kinda cold out with humidity) we let our equipment sit outside for about half an hour before we start.

Of course... we do keep an eye on it depending on which school we're at...
 
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To keep condensation from mucking up all the innards of your camera, seal it in a plastic bag before you go outside. Do the same with lenses. A half-hour should be plenty of time to let the camera come up to temp.
 
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Okay thanks. That helps. I should have posted this in the camera and lenses section I just realized. I have also been having trouble with the video recording. It keeps saying 'recording has stopped automatically'. I am using the T2i. Can this happen during when moving the camera, cause that's when it's happening lately. It never happened while moving the camera before, but it is a lot lately.
 
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harmonica44 said:
I have also been having trouble with the video recording. It keeps saying 'recording has stopped automatically'. I am using the T2i. Can this happen during when moving the camera, cause that's when it's happening lately. It never happened while moving the camera before, but it is a lot lately.
Click to expand...

Have you changed cards recently?
 
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No but I put same one in after uploading it to a laptop, then deleting it, to make more room. Could this be the problem? I have switched cards before during shoots, and no problems till now.
 
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30 minutes acclimatization is what I did when shooting an instructional promo for a ski lodge.

The wax is an unethical statement -- don't encourage people to actually damage their equipment, even if you think it's funny.
 
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harmonica44 said:
I have also been having trouble with the video recording. It keeps saying 'recording has stopped automatically'. I am using the T2i. Can this happen during when moving the camera, cause that's when it's happening lately. It never happened while moving the camera before, but it is a lot lately.
Click to expand...

That's the camera being unable to write to the card fast enough.

This can be caused initially by a too high bitrate (which is likely N/A if you dont use Magic lantern and are just running standard canon settings), a slow SD card (45mb/s upwards or so will be plenty), or a cluttered or nearly full SD card (as the camera is having to write data to the card in fragmented clusters).

The last option is the most likely cause, and once you've copied across any important files to your PC, formatting your SD (in camera) will see it writing smoothly again.


Moving the camera will not affect it as such, but that moreso depends on what you are shooting. The extra data the camera has to record when filming busy or fast changing scenes will indeed use more space than say, a blank wall with no movement, and can therefore affect the ability of the processor and card buffer to cope with it.

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Equipment should always be left to acclimatise when moving it from different temp/humid zones, and you will have no problems. This is especially important when coming home/indoors from shooting - make sure the equipment climbs back to room temp before storage to prevent it retaining moisture and going mouldy/forming corrosion etc.

Once mould grows into your glass it's there for good, and can infect other cameras/lenses if used/stored with them.
 
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let the lenses acclimatise, your better doing that and shooting 30 minutes later than having streaky lenses because you keep wiping the condensation off.

also try putting some dessicated silica gel packets in your camera bag, like you get in shoeboxes. its good at absorbing moisture!
 
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Okay thanks. I will see if the camera stores have them. I also am using magic lantern, and before I started using it, the camera hardly shot off compared to now. So maybe that's the problem.
 
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never even looked into magic lantern .. but i know that h.264 is terrible for color grading, even if you transcode most of the chroma is lost.

does magic lantern let you record in pro res or raw ?
 
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