We got hit by a good-old-fashioned blizzard yesterday so, of course, I had to get out to take a few photos. I wasn’t crazy enough to try to drive anywhere; our street was unplowed all day and conditions were terrible so I just took a walk around the neighborhood. It was about 32 F so I wasn’t concerned about getting cold but it was snowing heavily. I don’t have any official inclement weather gear for my camera so I placed a large plastic bag around the camera to protect it from the snow while I was walking. I’ve done this in past years and it works well.
I took my Canon 7D with an ES 17-85mm lens on it and set it to overexpose by 1-1/3 stops. When I saw something that I wanted to photograph, I pulled the plastic bag off of the camera, took a shot or two, and then put the bag back on. Some snow gets on the camera, of course, but it’s not much. One concession to the heavy snow was that I didn’t spend much time composing my shots, I just took a quick aim and pressed the shutter button. If necessary I’d have to use Photoshop or Lightroom to crop and straighten things up.
On real cold days, when I return to the house I place the entire camera, lens and strap inside of a large zip-lock bag and seal it shut before I go in. This keeps the moisture from the warm inside air from condensing on the cold camera gear. I let it sit inside the bag for an hour or so to warm up before taking it out. Because it wasn’t real cold I didn’t do that yesterday, however, and didn’t observe any problems with condensation. I did carefully dry off the camera with some soft rags and used lens tissue to dry and clean the lens.
Here are a few photos of the neighborhood during the storm. Some were still a bit underexposed so I should probably try +1-2/3 or +2 stops next time. However, none of the scenes included any significant dark areas to lose and, since I shoot in RAW, it was very easy to correct the exposures. There’s nothing spectacular here but I think they’re interesting in part because most people were sitting inside at the time while the beauty of winter was just outside their door.