Cold weather effect on 20mm 2.8 USM lens

[john20]

I recently got a 20mm 2.8 USM lens. It is the widest I could afford

for my D60.(I didn't like the 20-35mm). Until today I was very

pleased with it. I live in Canada and today it was -8 deg Cel. I

was trying out some landscape shots with my new lens, only to find

when I downloaded them, they all had a fuzzy spot in the middle.

Until today, all my images were taken inside, and have been

excellent. Today was the first time my camera was used in such cold

weather, so I thought it may be the camera. I ran some tests with

one of my other lenses(28 1.8), and had no problem at all. Does the

cold affect some lenses? Or do I have a faulty lens? Any help is

greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks,

John

[bill_goldman]

I suspect you may have some moisture condensation in your lens. Allow it to dry out for a couple of days and try taking some pictures indoors. I think you will see the problem is gone.

[PuppyDigs]

Sounds like you neglected to acclimate your gear before using it. Large temperature and humidity changes will cause condensation to form on your gear. It's especially bad if it happens inside a lens or on electronics. To prevent condensation, allow 45 minutes to an hour for gear to acclimate inside a case or plastic bag before taking it out to shoot.

[jonathan_ratzlaff]

Generally you only run into condensation problems when you take a cold object into a warm environment, however if you breathe on alens by mistake the front element could fog up. The depth of field in a 20 is so great that anything on the front element that would be ignored by a longer focal length lens sticks out like a sore thumb.

[jean_berthe]

I too live in Canada and greatly enjoy winter photography. I always keep silicone silicate in all my bags and let all my bags acclimatize at least one hour, inside or outside, before taking the gear out of the bag (except spare batteries and film). I rarely take any gear out of the bag while it is still cold. I hope that it is because of this that I never had condensation problems, yet.

 

I would not suspect the lens, unless there are traces of fungus on an inside lens that is reacting to the cold in a semi-opaque fashion.

 

However, I do not know what would frost do on the CMOS receptor of a D60? I would be curious to hear from Canon Canada about guidelines for using their digital SLRs in very cold weather.