Shooting XL1S in cold weather
 

Hi everybody!

I Just made a 20 minute shot outdoors in Celsius -27 degrees (-17 in Fahrenheit). No problems.

First I put the camera in a plastic bag and closed it carefully, and then took it outdoors and let the camera body's temperature sink to the same as the outdoor temperature. Then took it out of the bag and made the 20 minute shot. Then put the camera back in the plastic bag, closed it carefully and took it inside. After a few hours I took the camera out of the plastic bag and watched the footage.

No problems nor error messages appeared, the camera worked just fine. Even the normal battery worked fine, and it was only 50% loaded!! (well, I didn't use the motored zoom and autofocus)

Two still images taken from that footage (shot in normal mode, not frame mode; the "smoke" is not smoke but breath):

http://oamk.fi/~maalto/xl1s/

Merry Christmas!

--Markus

Those pictures were pretty good, I liked the second one especially. What was the exposure setting you used? (I mean the knob on the left hand side...ie A,0 or -3?)
I'm experimenting with mine trying to find the best setting for night time recordings.

The exposure was on Automatic [A] with no corrections :-)

Actually, the situation was not very easy since there was a stage with hard spotlights. Therefore, when shooting the happenings on the stage so that also a lot of the audience is seen in the picture you should correct the exposure with say -2 whole appertures, otherwice the stage will burn white. Or could also try the spotlight mode in XL1S (haven't tried it yet). The difficult thing is that the spotlight situations are always so different.

The situation in this image2.jpg is that there is one spot shining towards the camera and then this dark audience. Heh, I think they balance each others and that's why the exposure is nearly ok ;-)

The XL1S is very new to me and I have to make more studies to get familiar with it. Seems like the more I use it the more I love it...

--Markus

Another neat trick is to set the Mode to Auto, zoom in on the subject you're most interested in to get the right exposure, hit the EXP LOCK button, this locks the exposure, zoom back out again. You should have what you're interested in perfectly exposed, with everything else just as is.
I do the same sort of thing with the focus as well, I set the button on the lens to manual focus, zoom in and hit the one-time auto-focus button on the lens and then zoom out again.