Weather Warning

How to protect your digicam against the elements

Camera equipment, whether digital or film, requires careful handling and protection, especially against extreme weather. Most digicams are more susceptible than film cameras to adverse conditions, and many may malfunction in cold weather.

If you use any camera in the cold and bring it indoors or warm it quickly, water in the atmosphere will condense on the cold surfaces, especially the lens. Moisture can

then leak into the camera, destroying electronics and corroding metal. Consumer digicams are especially vulnerable because they're not sealed as well as 35mm SLRs built for professionals, and because moisture damage to digicams often cannot be repaired.    Some manufacturers are now bringing out models they claim are weather- and moisture-resistant. Ads for the new Pentax Optio33WR show the tiny 3.2-megapixel (MP) camera floating in water. Personally, I wouldn't try that, despite the camera's JIS Class 7 rating (which means the camera is submersible in one metre of water for up to 30 minutes). But the robust water-resistance rating means you should be safe shooting in the rain or near water. Olympus has two new "all-weather" models: the four-megapixel Stylus 400 Digital and the 3.2-megapixel Stylus 300 Digital. Camera specs, however, say they only operate safely down to freezing.

The solution to the condensation problem is fairly simple. First, don't keep the camera close to your body to keep it warm. If it gets cold while you're using it and you put it back inside your coat, water will condense. Keep if in 3 camera pack on your belt or on your back.

Experienced winter photographers carry a large zip-lock bag or other wet-proof container. Before coming in out of the cold, they zip the camera into the bag and keep it there until it warms to room temperature. Water may condense on the bag, but won't get on the camera.

Cold can cause other problems as well. Alkaline, nickel-cadmium (NiCad) and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries lose power in the

cold, or lose it more quickly. Since digicams draw a lot of power, this is a significant problem. Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries reportedly perform better in the cold.

One solution is to keep batteries warm in your pocket when not in use. Even better, carry two sets, one always warm, and swap regularly. Users report that if NiMH batteries stop working in the cold they will regain power with warming.

Flash memory cards may also stop working or malfunction in cold weather, though some manufacturers now have products that better in harsh weather. SanDisk says its Extreme line cf CompactFlash (CF) and SD cards have been tested in conditions from -25 to +85 degrees Celsius. Extreme CF cards are priced from $150 for a 256MB unit to $650 fora 1GB unit, compared to $100 to $450 for standard SanDisk CF cards.

Digital cameras are susceptible to moisture in any weather. Even the high humidity of the tropics can damage or destroy digicams.

Vancouver-based nature and travel photographer Danny Catt took one of his digital cameras on assignment to Africa two years ago. He even kept it in a plastic bag, but after it got "a little damp," it stopped working. "It was toast," Catt says. "It couldn't be fixed."

Keep digicams in a sealed, moisture-tight container. Zip-lock bags, if properly sealed, are usually fine. Throwing in a bag of silica will provide additional protection. For ultimate protection, consider a watertight camera housing from ewa-marine (www.ewamarine.com), designed to let you take your camera underwater. Ewa-marine also has rain capes for cameras.

If you just need a dry place to store your camera to transport it, LowePro has two DryZone models guaranteed to keep your gear dry even if you dump the bag in the drink. If zipped properly, it floats.

The Centre of Attention

Some judicious cropping helps focus attention on the primary subject in the vacation photo.

Here's how cropping can make your pictures more powerful

One of the great things about digital photography is the creative scope you have after you've taken the picture. Using image-editing software on your computer, you can improve your pictures in all sorts of ways.

Judging by the entries for our more recent Photo Opportunity Contest (see page 40), some digital shutterbugs don't take advantage of these possibilities. We received several entries with too much extraneous material: areas of the picture that distract attention from the primary subject.

With any image-editing program, it's dead-simple to get rid of superfluous subject matter. Just select the crop function, then drag your mouse over the area you want to keep. Almost always, this will focus viewer attention on your primary subject, and make your picture more powerful. Just remember to leave your original picture intact by saving the cropped image under a different filename.

Even a great picture, such as Suzanne Leblanc's grand-prize-winning photo of her husband tossing their son into the air, can benefit from a little judicious cropping. Major cropping would have focused viewer attention on the bee (rather than the flower) in Rodney Allison's photo, which won an honourable mention in our contest.

Cropping can help compensate for limitations in your equipment. If you can't get close enough to a distant subject when shooting your kid's hockey game or your family frolicking in the waves (you don't want to get your camera wet, do you?), and your lens won't zoom in at close as you'd like, you can crop on your computer. The same applies if your camera won't let you focus as close as you'd like on a small subject.

Reviewers and manufacturers correctly point out that there are many considerations besides megapixels when buying a digital camera. Without a good lens, metering system and digital processing circuitry, a high-megapixel image sensor is wasted. A three-megapixel digicam will let you make photo-quality five-by-seven-inch pictures.

But when you crop pictures, you're throwing away picture information. If you crop severely, the final image may look fuzzy or blocky, because there aren't enough pixels left to make a good print. More megapixels give you more freedom to crop your photos after you've shot them, while still retaining acceptable image quality. •>

In Rodney Allison's close-up photograph, major cropping helps focus attention on the bee instead of the flower.

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