I think the Soviet Zorki and Fed were pretty tough, one Zenit SLR was used in Libya at +60C, when all the others failed.
I do not remember anything about freezing temperatures, the lube in leaf shutters is among the first to gel up.
Focal plane shutters are not so easily affected by cold.
The main thing in all mechanical devices will be lube grade used, if you are into winter pics, a suitable grade must be used, which means strip down and rebuild every season, as that lube may not like summer conditions.
Depends where you use the unit, and how much care you take of you tools, really.
I do not remember anything about freezing temperatures, the lube in leaf shutters is among the first to gel up.
Focal plane shutters are not so easily affected by cold.
The main thing in all mechanical devices will be lube grade used, if you are into winter pics, a suitable grade must be used, which means strip down and rebuild every season, as that lube may not like summer conditions.
Depends where you use the unit, and how much care you take of you tools, really.
Fast B&W film has been around for quite some time. The 3.34 Megapixel sensor in the Coolpix 880 was not so fast and got noticeably grainy in a digital way when asked to do a long exposure. A 35mm or larger camera has a much larger area for capturing light than the sensor in a typical affordable digital camera. There was also a color shift in low light situations, and no manual ASA (ISO) adjustment. The first lightning picture in post 18 was taken with the 880. I simply covered the lens, and pushed the button in auto mode, then moved the black card covering the lens. The shutter would stay open until a lightning flash or other light source told the late 1990's brain chip that it had gathered enough light. Some grain is visible in that picture, but I have some that are much worse. There are, and always were 4 stuck pixels in the early sensor. Two cyan dots are visible in the light area, and two magenta dots are visible in the sand. They are less obtrusive in a daylight picture. I got a "pro-sumer" grade Sony DSC-F828 two years later which was much better. I still have that camera, one of the grandkids killed the 880.
The winter trip to Minnesota (yes, -27F) was a once in a lifetime event. I was born in Miami Florida and lived in that area until I retired from Motorola in 2014 at the age of 62. All of my film photography took place in the heat and humidity of Florida except for the Minnesota trip. Having never even seen snow before, I was well prepared for the cold weather in Minnesota, but never even thought about the camera stuff until I got there, and malfunctions happened.
I honestly wouldn't have expected a malfunction like that either. I would have expected shorter battery life and maybe a cranky autofocus from hardened lubricants, but not that stuff would tear apart.
I was assuming that modern cameras were good down to -40C as most electronic bits these days cover the industrial range of -40C to +85C. I was pretty dismayed when I read the specs on my Fuji X-T4 and saw -5C even for the "harsh weather" products. -5C doesn't fit my definition of harsh.
Tom
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My Minolta X500 stops working at -15C (roughly speaking) which I put down to the battery mostly although I find the film advance does get sluggish. I just keep it inside my jacket. My Rolleiflex TLR is too big to fit under my jacket but I don’t go out that much when it’s cold enough to make the film brittle. My Leica M seems fine in the cold.
Well, we are talking digital here 🙂
Car pictures have been taken for way over a century now.
That said, mechanical cameras have their issues too: Lartigue´s picture shows the typical and unavoidable distortion: the tilted oval shape of the wheel , caused when an object moves horizontally (in this case the car) an the shutter is also a horizontally moving curtain.
The shutter setting may give a false sensation of "speed", you set it to 1/500 or 1/1000 and think you will freeze everything ... think again.
Such settings do NOT mean at all that shutter is fully opened and then fully closed in such a short time, in fact there are two curtains involved, moving under spring pressure, one released first to open the field, the second released a fraction of a second later to cover it.
Indicated exposure time is the difference between them (VERY clever idea) but you actually have a slit/window moving across film, which takes snail speed of 1/30th of a second.
The car will move a lot in such a period.
"Modern" cameras (Japanese reflex era from 60s on) increased speed to 1/60 , and I owned a Praktica camera with a very fast 1/125 metallic curtains shutter.
Killer for action photos but noise would wake the dead.
Please be aware that auto focus cameras, film and digital, have plastic gears in there, mostly polyacetal resin, sometimes nylon.
That is safe only about to -10C, it breaks apart after that.
The fix here was brass gears, specially made, as the original gears were a bit difficult to get.
The digital cameras also have pop out lenses at times, mostly flimsy, if you hit it on say a wall, game over.
Mow, most people would be best off with a camera phone, they are getting good.
A 35 mm negative contains 80 mega pixels or so, and camera phones with 50 mega pixels are getting common.
You need only 3.5 mega pixels for a magazine cover, to put that in perspective.....
That is safe only about to -10C, it breaks apart after that.
The fix here was brass gears, specially made, as the original gears were a bit difficult to get.
The digital cameras also have pop out lenses at times, mostly flimsy, if you hit it on say a wall, game over.
Mow, most people would be best off with a camera phone, they are getting good.
A 35 mm negative contains 80 mega pixels or so, and camera phones with 50 mega pixels are getting common.
You need only 3.5 mega pixels for a magazine cover, to put that in perspective.....
My uncle served 3 tours of duty in Korea, I think it was the 121st Evac, part of IX Corps. After he passed I found a bunch of slides he had never shown to his nephews and neices (there was a lot of fraternizing amongst the nurses and docs) -- most likely these were shot with the aforementioned Leica IIIf with a 50mm Summicron on Kodachrome. That these have zero fungus.
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Like you, my wife and I had only lived in warm climates until we decided to move to Canada. I was concerned that our ignorance about personal safety in extreme cold weather would prove dangerous or fatal. That was one of the reasons why we ended up in BC, in the Lower Mainland. It's the warmest part of Canada when winter rolls around.
It's rare for temperatures to drop below -5C (that's +23F) around here, though the winter of 2021 was a freakish exception, hitting -22C (-7.6F) right after Christmas. In fact BC was hit by extreme freakish weather multiple times in 2021, ranging from wildfires and heat waves to catastrophic flooding, and finally, a cold snap that brought temperatures not seen for many decades.
Since moving to BC, I've read a number of tragic stories in local newspapers about people who froze to death because, like me, they didn't know all the right things to do. Often the story involves a mistake as simple as going for an easy hike in a nearby park, on a beautiful sunny winter afternoon, dressed in shorts and T-shirt and wearing sneakers, only to have the weather change abruptly for the worse an hour later.
If you don't have warm clothing, an emergency shelter, and emergency blankets with you, you will die quickly in the cold.
This happens tragically often, and it happens as nearby as North Vancouver, where there are some big nature parks and good sized mountains. Go for a walk up a mountain trail on a fine winter day without the right safety gear, and you may never come back down.
-Gnobuddy
Old Kodachrome holds up so well. A couple of years ago I scanned about 100 Kodachrome slides from the early 50s. They look fantastic, so much better than the reversal films I scanned from the 70s and 80s which were mostly a magenta mush.
Kodachrome is a dye-coupling process, where stable dyes are deposited in each image layer. All other commercially available color films were
chromogenic- they form the dyes in place, unfortunately they are not so stable.
Just as there is something way more satisfying about listening to music through a component system rather than via BT off a phone, there is something deeply satisfying about about taking photos with a dedicated camera. In the shift from specialization to convenience things of value are always lost.
I worked the camara sales counter at JC Penneys in Washington Square, Beaverton, OR. 1978?...when the Canon A1 came out...& the Polavision was pitched to us by local rep, didn't sell a one of them. I took to Photography in high school, remembering everything. A regular customer came in wanting to unload his "old" camara, eighty bucks...my first real camera. A Nikon F, simple penta-prisim, no meter, 55mm, F 1.4 .
My wife recently bought a new Nikon D3500 & a pair of lenses...still haven't figured it all out...same curse as all of our current technology, oceans of menus. I went from "zero" technology, to a drowning sea of technology.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rick...
My wife recently bought a new Nikon D3500 & a pair of lenses...still haven't figured it all out...same curse as all of our current technology, oceans of menus. I went from "zero" technology, to a drowning sea of technology.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rick...
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I still have my 1970's vintage Super8MM films and projectors(2).
Some of the stuff I took movies of back then cracks me up today.
Some of the stuff I took movies of back then cracks me up today.
I still have maybe four rolls of exposed 35mm film, images locked up inside that chemical matrix...15-20 years now. On a similar note, I have perhaps 3-4 "crashed" & fully non-functional computers with their "trapped" images. In addition, I have a handful of Compactflash memory cards, including a "big" 256 MB one...Since this card has long since gone obsolete, I wonder just what gems of "moments in time" reside deep inside.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rick...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rick...
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