Whats a Good Camera for Living Out My Childish Jack London Fantasies?
What do you mean by “reasonably good pictures”? When mountaineering, I take a Canon PowerShot in my pocket. Not even a hard shell; it’s a tough little camera. The advantage is that I can take pictures very quickly with minimal setup. The result is that I take a lot more pictures than those who have to stop and screw around with a camera bag whenever they want to take a photo. An SLR with nice lenses is certainly capable of taking better pictures, but it takes longer. Also- assuming you’ll be in a tent/sleeping bag at night- take the batteries out and sleep with them inside your bag. I’d bring extra batteries if I were out for a week, and keep them next to your body.
I think your biggest problem is going to be finding a camera with a min operating temperature that low. For most cameras its freezing. The reason for this is that the batteries and LCDs don’t always do so well far below that. Considering the camera will get a nice low and long freeze over night, and temperatures won’t break freezing during the day this could be a problem. If you can work your way around that, any camera you manage to find that meets your requirements will do. Just be careful letting electronics go through huge temperature swings (from cold to hot; from outdoors to indoors). At the very least, put it in a Ziploc bag to prevent condensation forming inside it when you put it through a shift like that. As for battery life. You don’t say how long you’ll be out. One of the nice things about DSLRs is that they don’t require you to use the LCD (you can always turn it off on most point and click models too). Combine this with restricted use of the flash, you’ll actually get qui
As someone who has gone dog-sledding and thinks that -5F is normal February weather, I think any point and shoot camera would be fine if you keep the camera next to your body. A DSLR is bad idea since it would be too big to fit in a pocket. With the camera close to your body, it will stay warm and you will be able to take pictures pretty quick. Dog sledding can be very cardio-intensive so you will be pumping out lots of heat. You probably won’t even need a hard case since you are not likely to fall down very much while sledding (unlike say learning to snowboard). Plus a hard case and digging through your backpack all the time will freeze your hands. At night, your tent/cabin will be warm enough to keep it in good working order. Using a ziplock bag and turning off the LCD viewfinder are good ideas of Normandy Jack. As for the automatic focus, I have never noticed a problem taking pictures on a snowy day. I have owned Canon and Sony cameras. However, I have never heard of this being a pr
One more idea, get a camera with a sport mode and movie mode. When you are resting on the sled and your partner is kicking, the sport mode will enable you to take reasonable pictures as the sled moves along (really short exposure time). The movie mode is good for capturing all the barking dogs and the movement through the forest that still pictures can’t. Having said that, I believe all cameras have those modes nowadays so you would have gotten those features by default.
