A Little News

My friend Corey Wilson seems to have attracted a lot of attention since his post on shooting in the Deep Freeze in Green Bay during the NFC Championship game. On the Fred Miranda Forum there is a great debate raging over the competence of the camera and the photographer. For any of you guys coming in from that forum or the several other interested parties, let me fill in some blanks for you. Corey has been working in the cold conditions with Nikon gear exclusively for the last five years. His paper has talked about changing over to Canon as some other Gannett papers have done but they have not taken the plunge.

There was some speculation the Corey took the cameras straight from the locker room to the field but as I understand it, he was in a photo workroom prior to the game. While I am sure it was heated, I do not think it was a situation where it was humid nor do I think the Packer’s locker room would have been excessively humid prior to the game for the simple reason that it would have made the players that much colder upon entering the stadium to play football. Since other cameras coming from the same workroom as Corey’s did not fail, I can only assume that the workroom was not the source of the problem.

Corey states in the earlier post where he detailed his personal preparation that there was not much to do for the camera to prep it for the cold. One of the comments posted indicated that some photographers will tape hand warmers to their camera battery compartments in cold weather to help the battery from becoming sluggish in the cold weather. To my knowledge, none of the shooters from the Press Gazette did that. From what Corey describes in his post about the blank frames, I would diagnose a battery problem rather than a camera problem. I know I used to have the same problem shooting with the D1 cameras when the battery would drop below as certain ampere rating. This usually happened after about a year of use and the battery would not fully recharge. My guess is, and it is only a guess, is the batteries were falling victim to the cold and causing the cameras to fail.

Some speculated on Fred Miranda that the problem may lie with condensation in the camera. This could also be a problem, particularly if the condensation were in the battery compartment. In that kind of weather, the only source of condensation would be the photographer’s breath. There is some possibility that Corey’s breathing with face pressed to the camera back as a sports photojournalist is constantly doing could have introduced some moisture into the system causing the freeze ups. This is only speculation but if you think about it, you will remember seeing guys with facial hair with frozen mustaches or beards solely from the condensation caused by their breathing. Who knows, maybe my man is a heavy breather.

What I really think is that Press Gazette guys just ran into some bad luck whatever the source might be. I know Corey personally to be very attentive to his gear and a complete professional so I am pretty sure his competence does not come into play. Personally, I don’t think that a poor performance demonstrates an inherent flaws int he D3; although, I am not likely to have an opportunity to test that theory in balmy North Alabama.