Dealing with Humidity and Condensation

A lot of photographers have to deal with moisture issues, thanks to temperature and moisture differentials between inside and outside air. Here’s what I came up with while trying to boil the question down.

For hot, damp climates, here are two scenarios you’re likely to run into:

1) You’re about to go outside into hot, humid weather after having been in a cool, air conditioned place. Your camera is cold, the air will be hot and damp.

In this case, leave the camera in the bag for a while after going outside. This will give the camera time to warm up within the dryer air inside the bag.

2) You’re outside in hot, humid air and about to go inside an air conditioned place. Your camera is warm, the air will be cold and dry.

In this case, you want to leave the camera exposed until after you get inside. Why? Because if you put it in the bag outside, you will be trapping warm, moist air in the bag, which will then cool down, resulting in condensation. When you wait until after coming inside, the trapped air will be cool and dry already, resulting in no condensation. Having a warm camera exposed to cool, dry air will not result in condensation.

In cold climates, this would have to be reversed: Take the camera out before going outside, and put it back in the bag before coming back in. This is because the warm and cold air are in reverse positions, obviously.

So , to make a general rule of thumb for this, one could say “warm out, cool in”, meaning take the camera out where it’s warm and put it away where it’s cool. :)

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The rest of this is basically me yapping…feel free to ignore it if all you want is practical info. :)

I live in a climate that’s not very humid in the summer months, and often gets pretty damn cold in the winter, so I have to worry more about cold weather scenarios. I also have an advantage: I wear eyeglasses, so over the years I’ve built up a good intuitive knowledge about when I can expect my glasses to fog up. This has allowed me to discover one exception to the above rule, based on the idea that if my glasses don’t fog up, then the camera will be fine.

This exception has to do with cars in the winter. I usually feel free to bring the cold, exposed camera back into the car because I have never once had my glasses fog up in that situation. From a scientific standpoint, it makes sense: All the air inside the car is drawn from outside, and then heated up. The heating doesn’t add any moisture to the air, so from the standpoint of condensation, there isn’t any risk. (I.e., take a container of air and heat it up. No matter how hot you get, or how humid the air is to start with, you are not going to get condensation because you are going in the wrong direction, temperature-wise.)

The reason this is an exception is that normally there are other factors in play. We tend to intentionally humidify our homes in the winter, to keep the air from getting painfully dry. Another possibility is if you are getting into a car with people in it–their exhaled breath could substantially increase the humidity inside the car, and then some care would be necessary. Note that if you have your heater set to recirculate the air inside the car, that will trap your own exhaled breath inside the car, and give you the same problem as if there are other people there. But usually people don’t do that, because it also results in excess frost buildup on the windshield, which impairs driving. :)

The key to all of this is dewpoint. Dewpoint is a temperature that depends on the physical quantity of water that’s evaporated into the air. Warmer air can contain more moisture than cold, so as the air cools, it eventually reaches the temperature where moisture will start to spontaneously condense. That is the dewpoint. It’s lower if there is less water in the air, or higher if there is more.

In warm climates, it may be helpful to watch out for dewpoints that are higher than the temperature of indoor places. In cold climates, this isn’t so much help, because you are not going to know the dewpoint of your house (although if you humidify, it can easily be higher than the outdoor temperature).

In any case, if your camera temperature is likely to fall below the dewpoint of the air that surrounds it, you need to take precautions.

Let’s revisit the two scenarios from above. You see on the weather that the dewpoint is 80 and the outside temperature is 95. The temperature in your nice, air conditioned hotel is 73.

1) Overnight, your camera cools down to 73 degrees. If you take it out of the bag and then go outside, the air will touch the camera, cool down to near 73 degrees, which is below the dewpoint, and voila, you now have condensation forming on your camera, just like the sweat on a cold beverage. The solution is to leave it in the bag for a while after going outside. You’ll get some dampness on the outside of the bag as moisture condenses, but the inside will stay dry as it warms up (provided you keep the outside air out of there). Eventually your camera will be warm enough that when you take it out, moisture will not condense on it.

2) Going back inside, if you put the camera in the bag, zip it up, and go inside, the air in the bag will still be 95 degrees and humid, but the air conditioning will start to cool it down immediately. As it drops below its dewpoint of 80 degrees, moisture will start to condense and the inside of your camera bag, along with whatever is in there, will get all damp. However, if you leave the camera out as you walk into the building, you’ll have a 95 degree camera and bag coming into 73 degree air. The outside air will stay outside. Once you are inside, then put the camera away. (One problem with this method might be territorial shop owners who don’t want to allow cameras inside unless they are bagged already. Hmmmm. In that case, another solution might have to be worked out, such as, for example, taking the camera into a friendly building, bagging it, leaving it in the bag, and then going to the shop. That sounds like a royal pain in the neck, though. Another idea might be to leave the cover of the bag unzipped, and discreetly flap the cover to ensure that the cool, indoor air gets into the bag as quickly as possible. I have not tried this, so I do not know how it would actually work out, but it seems to make sense.)

One final dewpoint example: The reason my car exception above actually works is because 1) the dewpoint inside the car will be the same as outside, because changing the temperature alone does not affect the dewpoint, and 2) that dewpoint will be at or below the outside temperature. Unless it’s snowing heavily. :) If you’re skeptical about it, then just put the camera in the bag outside of the car. Better safe than sorry. :)

For further discussion of this, try this discussion on Flickr.

Another Revision

I’ve decided that a new, general purpose blog is really not something I’m interested in getting started right now, especially since I already have blogs back on Blogger which could serve the purpose perfectly well if I ever feel like starting that up again (and hey, one of them still gets 50 to 75 hits per day, even though it must be a year since I’ve posted there).

So anyway. I’m turning this back into a blog about my photography stuff (and possibly other creative endeavors, such as if I ever manage to get back into using Garageband, although at the moment that doesn’t seem very likely). Mostly I’m thinking of just talking about photography stuff, I’m not thinking of linking many of my photographs here. For that, you can go to my Flickr stream. Well, maybe I’ll link a thumbnail or two here. I haven’t decided that yet. What can I say–over time, I think a blog is better if it evolves into a mature form, rather than having everything decided at the beginning. And right now, this blog has never progressed beyond the embryo stage. ;)

At this point I am undecided whether to delete the posts that are now “off topic”, or just make them private or what. The only thing I’m decided on is that I don’t want to deal with it right now. :)

Basically why I’m getting back into this is that I keep writing out these big long posts on Flickr discussions and then deciding I don’t want to actually post them there (for reasons too obscure to explain). But with some if them, it occurs to me that they’d make halfway decent blog entries. I’ve actually done this once already, a post called Raw Workflow Software (and which is now due for a substantial update, as a matter of fact).

So that is that. Onward!

Startling AI Breakthrough!

Check it out: CADIE! :) I don’t know about you, but this alleviates a lot of my fears about AI’s potentially taking over the planet and wreaking heinous amounts of eeeeeeeeevil. ;)

Brought to you by the fine folks at Google research, apparently. Click here for more details.

RAW workflow software

[This comes from a response I was typing up on a Flickr discussion forum, in an "Aperture vs. Lightroom" discussion--as I wrote, I realized I had a lot more that I wanted to talk about than just the comparison between those two programs, so I decided it would fit better here than there.]

I need to try The Gimp sometime. I auditioned a trial version of Photoshop CS3 a while back, and found it to be WAY more program than I’m ever likely to need. Plus there’s the expense of it–not only the high initial sticker price, but even the cost of the individual upgrades is more than what I typically pay for brand new software applications. Clearly, I’m not the target market for Photoshop CS. ;)

As for the difference between Lightroom and Aperture, I’d call it a tossup. With both of them, their strength is more in the realm of organization than anything else. Neither one of them offers a fully functional curves tool, for example. Last I checked, Lightroom’s curves tool was limited, and Aperture didn’t have one at all. I consider a fully functional curves tool an essential basic adjustment tool for RAW images, meaning it’s not something a person should have to pay $600 for—and really, the only reason Apple and Adobe leave it out of their programs is to avoid cutting into the marketability of the all-holy Photoshop, hallowed be its name.

This leads into my primary objection to these two programs–why should I pay $300 for an intentionally crippled piece of software? I’m just not going to do it. If they want to combine organizational tools and image editing tools into an all-in-one package, I think that’s great, but they should do it right and not put some artificial limit on the software. This is actually Apple’s problem more than Adobe’s–Adobe can rightly claim that Lightroom fits right into their product line, so if you need more capability, just pick up a copy of Photoshop, or even Photoshop Elements. What’s Apple’s excuse? Well, for them, it all boils down to not wanting to piss off Adobe. That’s it, the sole reason that Aperture doesn’t have a full feature set. Why should I pay $300 for that? (I also suspect that someone at Apple must have said, “Well, a curves tool is just too hard.” No, it’s not. The challenge with the tool is understanding the concept, and then practicing a little. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not only quite easy, but preferable to other methods, which is why I rant about it so much. But I forget—Apple users can’t be expected to learn anything complicated, can they? Like, for instance, how to use a tool that’s based on simple concepts that every school kid learns in the fucking seventh grade.)

For the time being I’ve settled on Silkypix Developer Studio, which I like. The Mac version is a little Windows-y, but it works. It can be slow, but there is an option to turn off the heavy number crunching to speed things up when you need to. I don’t find it useful as an organizer, so for now I’m stuck with my own kludged together workflow involving manual exporting from iPhoto and other tedious expediencies.

Other interesing programs I’m likely to get, eventually, are Capture One (by PhaseOne)–this was a pretty simple application which rendered really superb, beautiful colors, but it also had some issues when pointed at folders full of NEF files, so I decided to avoid it for now. There was also a lot to like about Nikon’s CaptureNX, which I’ll probably get, eventually. It’s a weird, quirky program, but extremely powerful, and actually pretty cool.

One big issue is color management. I found the two brands which seemed to handle this the best were, not surprisingly, Apple and Adobe. The others have some catching up to do.

What to do now…

…now that “the economy” seems to be pretty much hosed. I’ve commented to people recently that, so far, none of what’s been suggested seems likely to work. It’s not a matter of conservative or liberal, either—they’re all barking up the wrong tree as far as I’m concerned.

For instance, it seems pretty clear to me that one of the primary causes of our current mess is the proliferation of debt in recent decades. And yet, one of the main things that the powers-that-be keep striving for is to get the banks back in the lending business. The aim, of course, is to allow people to resume buying big-ticket items like cars and homes, in order to stimulate the economy and get things back on track. But this will also increase the overall debt load. Given that there’s a genuine fear of deflationary pressures running amok, increasing debt load seems like a really, really bad idea. Debt becomes easier to handle during times of inflation, so it stands to reason that deflation would make it more of a burden, right? So, if people are afraid of deflation, then why do we want to go further into debt?

I don’t have my thoughts on these matters in an organized enough format to enable me to post much coherent text here, so instead I’m just going to post a link to an interesting piece I’ve been reading:

Social Collapse Best Practices

It’s on the long side, but worth reading. It’s actually a transcript of a seminar, and the speaker talks about what it might take for ordinary people to survive if (or when) the economy collapses to such a degree that society no longer functions in the way to which we are accustomed. There are plenty of interesting ideas, such as speculation that little-used roadways would make effective rain-catchers for local agriculture, and so on. There’s also a lot of interesting comparisons (and contrasts) to the collapse of the Soviet economy in the early 1990’s. It’s a good read.

Bug or feature?

Annoyance of the day:

When I was coming here, I went up to the address line of my web browser and proceeded to type in “http://www.wordpress.com]” (accidentally hitting the right bracket key as I reached for the ‘enter’ key).

Rather than simply leaving that address in the address line and giving me a DNS error, the way nice browsers used to work, I was forwarded to a site called “Open DNS Guide”, whose address appeared in the address line, thereby preventing me from going up there and hitting the backspace key once to correct my typo. Instead, I had to retype the whole damn line.

Was that helpful? I don’t think so!!!

The Irony of Friedmanism

There’s a certain irony to the Friedmanite way of thinking. To a liberal like myself, the claim that free markets are self-correcting doesn’t seem to be true. Looking at it another way, though, it may be the case that they are right: a free market does self-correct, it’s just that the “corrections” involve massive job loss, poverty, and other evils which the general public quite rightly isn’t willing to put up with.

What’s ironic about it? If we had a decent social safety net we would be in a better position to let the markets run free, the way Friedmanites prefer, because when the corrections happened it wouldn’t hurt people so much. But who are the first people to do whatever they can to poleaxe a good social safety net? Friedmanites, of course.

Does believing this make me a liberal conservative???

Focus change

My original idea for this blog was to just post pictures here. However, since the photography thing seems to be indefinitely stalled for me, and because I have had a lot of urges to get on with some generalized blogging, and because I haven’t been watching much stuff that would be on-topic for my Four Things and a Lizard blog, and because I am sick and tired of Blogger, it has now become a good idea to just remove the specific focus from this blog. I’ll leave the pics up, because they are nice (and still on-topic), but it isn’t specifically going to be a photo blog anymore.

It’s probably ok, I don’t think anyone had been paying attention here anyway. ;)

I’m also going to have to do some other changes. The layout, the categories, and the tags were all set up for a photo blog. At the very minimum, I’m going to have to fix this layout so that my “Welcome!” page shows, and I suspect that means choosing a whole new template. Hmmmm. Something tasteful, somewhat minimal, and yet more functional than what I’ve currently got….

I’ve also changed the title. I do admit to feeling some regret over the loss of the old one. “My Pics” was kind of cute in its ostentatious lack of creativity. :) But it’s no longer accurate, so it had to go. The current title, “ce9999″ is just a placeholder until I think of something interesting. If I never do, then it’ll stay. I just don’t want to come up with something off-putting like, “Random Aimless Ruminations on Totally Arbitrary Stuff” or “Lots of Personal Angst and Generalized Whining About Everything” or the like. :)

Nikon D90 announced

The Nikon D90 has finally been officially announced. And it’s looking like a pretty sweet machine. :)

So now the choice gets tough for me, since I can’t really afford to buy any new equipment at all right now. But if I were going to consider a new camera body, there’d be this new model, or the D80, which should be available for a while yet, or a D200 if I could find one. I believe those can still be found.

Probably I’ll be stuck with the D40 for a while yet, though, and by the time I can afford to upgrade, the D90 and D300 will be reaching the end of their respective product lifetimes, which would mean being able to pick one of those up for less than what they cost now.

Branch

[2008.04.21]

DSLR vs Medium Format shootout

First, I do need to think of a new title for this blog. “My Pics” is cute, but something nicer would be, uh, nice. :) I had a great idea a few days ago as I was falling asleep, but now I can’t remember what it was!! I hate that.

I still haven’t decided yet how I’m going to handle this blog (although I have some interesting ideas mulling around in my head), but the desire is there to do something photography-related, which also includes samples of my more satisfactory photos. But also, why not post other stuff that’s related to the subject, and potentially of interest?

So, in that light, this article is an interesting read:

State-of-the-Art 35mm Digital Vs. Medium Format Film

The author sets up a resolution test between a medium format Pentax camera, shooting Fuji Velvia, and a Canon IDs. Mind you, this isn’t the current flagship Canon DSLR (IDs Mark III? I admit I have trouble keeping track of Canon’s model designations, since I’m not a Canon shooter myself), but an earlier, 11 megapixel version. The results are rather surprising, and somewhat counterintuitive. How can a 6×7 camera be capable of producing larger prints, but still end up showing lower resolution when compared with the Canon? And yet, that’s exactly what seems to be happening.

Leaves

[2007.05.25]

Snow Day

[2007.01.21]

Cold Blue

[2007.01.20]

Evening Stormclouds

[2007.06.20]