Extreme environment you brought your RF into.

ForestCap

ForestCap

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By extreme environment I mean very high/low temperature, cold wave/heat wave, stormy/tornado/typhoon/blizzard weather, a pack of raging wolves as well as other bio-hazard, etc. It also include streets/plazas with serious thieving, or crowding that may crush everything.

Share your story of you and your rangefinders, which were exposed to and survived the environment.
 
I have never used any of my rangefinders under water. Other than that, pretty much wherever whenever.
 
I'm not into the crowdocrashiness, buo-hazardousness and streetthuginess. I'm paid for visiting of something different.

This year winter at the evening after working day. Ottawa, Rideau Canal was frozen for record number of days open for skating. I went where on cold day alert. To my surprise, I wasn't alone at all.
Went skating for few hours Leica was at the top of my coat, exposed to the cold and at the second hour film broke in camera due to the cold.
But M4-2, lots of all age people and I weren't sissy.
 
Not a rangefinder, but I once sat in a camouflage tent in a bitter cold German winter night for hours at -20C to make pictures of an owl. My Leica R4 was covered with frost but worked flawlessly, until I tried to leave and couldn't get up! I seriously thought I would not make it home that night.
 
Brought mine to the ECU/Temple game 2014. It was raining and freezing cold. I tried to take some shots but my rangefinder window was fogging up and it was just miserable... Shots came out fine and both camera and lens are still working.
 
I walked under the rain (admittedly, not a storm) when a local festival got lots of water here in DeKalb. We were expecting rain, and it did come. I didn't expect to be out at that time, but I was. My M5 got all fogged up, but a couple of hours after coming home it was dry again, and kept ticking... and ticking... and ticking...

So far, it hasn't missed a beat! 🙂
 
I've shot my M3 and M6 in -20C weather condition.
My M240 and 35mm cron got splashed by salt water due to strong waves while in Cinque Terre last month.
 
I've been out in a few blizzards here in Southern Ontario with either an M9 or M240, where the snow was blowing horizontally and the winds were very strong (to the point where it was sometimes difficult to stand still). For the M9 there was a nifty little 3rd party app available called M9Info that would tell you what the M9's internal temperature sensor recorded for each image. IIRC, the lowest temperature was probably around -10˚C, which doesn't sound extreme. But my experience with digital cameras and around 15 winters now has been that they handle cold fairly well provided you're using them fairly regularly during an outing because of the heat generated by the internal components, such as the CPU and especially the data transfer between the buffer and memory card. Therefore I don't feel the reported temperature accurately portrayed the external temperature, nor the windchill factor. Anyway, the cameras were encrusted with snow and kept on, though one reason I replaced the M9 with the M240 was that it started becoming unreliable in freezing conditions. In hindsight it was probably more a problem of the batteries being on the old side and no longer handling the conditions well. Apparently lithium batteries don't do well in the cold and the M9's is fairly small, at least compared to the M240's, and may succumb more quickly if not in optimum condition...
 
I took my M6 in Djibouti in 1990 for 6 months. This is a very hot and humid place. Every night I removed the lens and left it with the body rest near an air conditioning evaporator to dry it out. It came out clean from that mission. It also went to Saudi Arabia for another 6 months right after that and received loads of sand wind without a problem.
 
M6TTL, briefly under salt water, dried as best possible with small gas oven on boat (door open etc), continued to be used for the rest of the trip in salt environment (8 weeks). Finally cleaned externally with fresh water on return. 8 years later it still works and hasn't gone green...yet.

Prior to the trip I did the following. 1) UV filter with petroleum jelly on the thread screwed in place and left there. 2) Thin layer of petroleum jelly on lens mount. 3) Ditto battery compartment lid.

As an aside the journalist in Das Boot (remember?) spends plenty of time eroding the front element of his Summar...
 
The roughest thing I've done with my rangefinders is strap them on my Harley and ride cross country with them, in August. They get pretty hot in the tank bag, but the foam I put them in dampens the Harley vibrations. I know of one guy who didn't use foam and the Hasselblad he strapped to his Harley ended up a bag of small parts after his journey.

That, and using them in some dry dusty conditions.
 
Brought my (now sold) M2 with TA rapidwinder and my M4 to Fallujah, Iraq from August, 2004 - January, 2005. Dragged them through a few weeks of intense urban combat.

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Leicas never stopped clicking there but I had a hell of a time with my Navy issued Nikon D2h. It doesn't like hot temperatures and the lens sucked (24-120 AFS VR version 1.)

Phil Forrest
 
Well, my rangefinders have been fortunate. Except for some mild cold or heat here in the area, and some occasional misty rain, I haven't pushed it. However, I have read stories told by some sports photographer where his Nikon F quite working while photographing a ski competition in pretty nasty weather. Meanwhile his M3/M2 kept on working.

For me, that is why I own a Pentax LX and a Pentax K5iis. Those are my extreme weather tools and both have been taken into some pretty nasty conditions.

The worst was a week long hike through the Toiyabe Range in mid-Nevada in late September. It snowed and sleeted the entire week and it was a real challenge to keep anything dry. The LX didn't give up though and about halfway through the hike I quit trying to baby it. I had to be careful not to breathe on the viewfinder because the fogging would take an hour to go away. I still own the camera and it still work fine. Unfortunately the lens, a Pentax 55/1.8, was not so lucky.
 
I have taken my Canon 7 in a snow storm to get some black and white but also took my Nikon FM2n when it got harder and more windy. That's about the extent.
 
climbed Kilimanjaro (5000+ metres) back in 2010, and documented it plus a lot more with Leica M8. no problems.

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I'm glad you and your cameras made it back.

Phil_F_NM said:
Brought my (now sold) M2 with TA rapidwinder and my M4 to Fallujah, Iraq from August, 2004 - January, 2005. Dragged them through a few weeks of intense urban combat.

fallujah01.jpg


fallujah05.jpg


fallujah04.jpg


fallujah02.jpg


Leicas never stopped clicking there but I had a hell of a time with my Navy issued Nikon D2h. It doesn't like hot temperatures and the lens sucked (24-120 AFS VR version 1.)

Phil Forrest
Click to expand...
 
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