The primary criterion for membership in the organization is “your income is largely or entirely dependent on photography”. Then you must have purchased two pro bodies, and three pro lenses through an authorized dealer. If you are offered membership, you receive priority repair service-- the implication being that extensive delays in repairing a lens or body will cost you money. Plus, you can test bodies before you purchase.
Now, the eligible bodies seem to cost more than $1200 and (with the exception of the obsolete D300s) are “full frame”. The question I have is whether something like a D610 or Df is built to the level where a pro can abuse it and still rely on it to work when he presses the shutter button.
They sometimes do the F-- error. The autofocus related ones can be worked around by switching to manual mode, in worst case. The lubrication issues more affect the other moving parts, in this case the mirror. Which admittedly does not affect video cameras. (And where along the line did this happen to be interchangeable-lens exclusively, anyway?)
If you keep the battery warm by your body heat, you have to be within the cable length from the camera. Which dooms you to the cold. (And yes, there are those click-to-warm gel packs that are actually used to keep batteries warm. So the problem widely exists and has a solution.)
The photographer’s inability to withstand -18°C weather is not a problem with the camera. Not that there’s any problem with a camera like the A7S simply because batteries don’t last as long in the winter. Not that Lithium batteries have particularly short battery life in the cold.
In this case not the mirror, since the A7S doesn’t have a mirror… which is why it is the most pro of any camera in the non-rangefinder mirrorless interchangeable-lens category
You’re right. It’s a discussion about the A7S (which happens to have interchangeable lenses), so I apologize for being overly inclusive).
Not all pros work in abusive conditions, and those that do get their gear serviced (and not necessarily only when something fails) a lot more frequently than most people. Regardless of whether membership requires you to make your money from photography, the fact remains that Nikon considers “prosumer” cameras to be pro. Whether those cameras currently considered “pro” are full frame or not seems to be irrelevant, not least because the A7S is also full frame.
The camera is not the only part of importance. We have to include both camera (and its components integral and replaceable), batteries, and the operator into the mix; failure of either will lead to lack of images, therefore failure of the whole mission. Either one can be the limiting factor.
The operator is the most neglected part in systems analysis. Often with catastrophic results.
Depends on how cold. They get fairly sluggish even at moderately low temperatures (ask iphones), not only losing available capacity but also losing most of its peak current delivery capability, and once the electrolyte freezes and the ion mobility drops near zero, you’re out.
The film was made with an f 1.4 lens-- (Rokinon 24mm f/1.4), Not many fixed lens cameras come with a lens that fast, or that fast and that wide. I wonder what the ISO was cranked up to-- the A7S is known for being very sensitive in low light.
It is when we’re talking about whether or not it is noteworthy that a camera actually works at -18.
Yes, all prior pictures made in the cold must have been made with purely mechanical cameras. Or maybe not, given the huge lubrication problems in mechanical systems that existed prior to the A7S.
While the state of (D)SLR and other camera technology can inform our understanding of the technology in the A7S, this doesn’t mean that the A7S has all the characteristics of those other cameras.
I wish I could find the Japanese video of a Pentax camera being used in a freezer. Before the test commenced, the tech put in a special industrial SD Card. Here, a external HDMI recorder was used–perhaps one kept in a insulated container. Assuming that an SDCard is even capable of recording 4K video. would it succumb to the cold?
Overall, the SD cards should function well at low temperatures. There are anecdotal reports of failures over the Net, which I consider unlikely to be the fault of the silicon; may be some supportive system, a bad contact, or some packaging-related issue (most of low-temperature limits are due to packaging).
I’d love to know more. Anybody who sees deeper into VLSI chip physics?
Not a focus issue, but if the power zoom motor breaks on one of Sony’s NEX camera’s power-zoom lenses (the new tiny ones), even if the manual zoom is still working (or hell, even if neither are working, but the focus motor still works at the currrent fixed zoom level), they become completely unusable. I know this from sad experience when I dropped my 5T on vacation last year.
This seems to have turned into a thread about cameras, but let me just say…
I love northern lights. I’ve seen them in real life several times. Watching Lapland northern lights on a quiet cliff… it’s magical. Now I really got that huge urge to go north again. I’m gonna move to Lapland at this rate, I swear.
Here’s a video of northern lights in Lapland (not mine). Not that they’re much different, but they’re beautiful enough to watch over and over again:
That’s one thing i’d wish to see before I die. Maybe later this year, maybe next? Will see… Would be nice to retire to the North, watch the fox fires burning on the sky, tend to the instruments listening to their RF songs…
(On a side note, some Finns managed to rig up two RTL-SDR dongles with the same clock crystal, for ionispheric diagnostics and passive radar by using radio transmitter reflections. One antenna directly to the transmitter, one to the sky for the reflected wave, and showing the differences in time delay and Doppler shift. The thing was able to detect airplanes and meteorite traces! There are youtube videos. Article here: http://kaira.sgo.fi/2013/09/passive-radar-with-16-dual-coherent.html , contains video of the signals.)
(Related thought: use the GPS sat signal, exploiting both the frequencies they broadcast on, plus possibly the additional Galileo and GLONASS frequencies/signals , for ionospheric tomography. Could be potentially used for mapping electron density in the volume.)
Random thought… The time to see the auroras is limited to night time, despite them existing in daytime too. That limits the available time to watch and spoils the opportunities when one gets up there in summer. What about eyeglasses with notch bandpass filters at the 558nm of ionized oxygen, the most common green line? That should greatly attenuate the sky background and increase contrast to something useful…
I’ve been thinking about moving to Lapland for a while, like maybe a year, if my life at some point allows it. There are lots of environmental care jobs there, plus tourism-related jobs, so I’d probably even find a job. My partner would certainly be up for it, he’s been in love with Lapland longer than I have. Ahh, the nature, the lack of people, the reindeer (to look and to eat!)…
That’s interesting, thanks for the link!
Just go north enough in the winter and the sun never even rises for a number of days! In the most north point of Finland, the sun never rises for 51 days. Imagine that. Luckily, that’s balanced out by a month of midnight sun in the summer.
Finland has this cool tool for tracking the possibility of northern lights: http://aurora.fmi.fi/public_service/ (click English in the top-right corner, then “Magnetíc disturbance levels”)
Like, if you were in Kilpisjärvi last night, you almost certainly could’ve seen auroras. I don’t know if that kind of measurement is done for public use in other countries. We’ve used it when we were in Lapland.
