Filming in the cold: batteries, breath and fingers
Warm pockets, plastic bags, two pairs of gloves and a thermos.
We film every winter: snow, frost, northern lights. Cold is beautiful on camera and hard on everything else. Batteries die, lenses fog, fingers stop working and breath gets into the shot. This is how we keep filming when the temperature drops below zero.
Batteries
Batteries lose power quickly in the cold. A battery that lasts two hours at room temperature might last forty minutes at minus ten. The power is not gone; the cold just stops the battery from delivering it. Warm it up, and much of it comes back.
So we carry three times as many batteries as we would in summer, and keep them warm. Spare batteries go in an inside pocket, close to the body. When one dies, it goes back in the pocket to warm up, and often works again an hour later.
Condensation
The biggest danger is not the cold itself but the change from cold to warm. When a cold camera comes into a warm room or car, the moisture in the air condenses on it, and inside it, like water on a cold glass. That can damage the electronics and fog the lens for an hour.
The answer is a plastic bag. Before going inside, put the camera in a sealed bag and let it warm up slowly, for an hour or more, before opening it. The water forms on the outside of the bag, not on the camera.
The cold never broke a camera of ours. The warm car did, once.
Jonah Mills
Breath
On a very cold day, your breath becomes a cloud. If you breathe near the camera, the cloud drifts in front of the lens, or freezes on the screen. We learned to breathe out to the side, or to hold our breath for the few seconds of an important shot.
Fingers
Cameras are made for warm, bare fingers. Thick gloves cannot press small buttons. We wear thin liner gloves that work with touch screens, with thick mittens over them. The mittens come off for the shot and go straight back on afterwards.
Plan short
Everything takes longer in the cold, and your judgement gets worse as you get colder. We plan shorter shoots in winter, with a warm place nearby, and we stop before we feel we have to. A shot is not worth frostbite.