Minus Thirty Two: Real Life with the Fuji X-T1 in Cold Weather

This past weekend my town had it's first cold snap of the year. We had a decent first snowfall and then the temperature dropped to -32C (-25F). With heavy fog and clear skies as a result of the cold whether I got up early-ish on Saturday to get some landscape shooting in.

I brought my X-T1, 14mm, 23mm, and 56mm with me. I also brought a B&W 10 stop ND to make things interesting. I found that the camera was relatively easy to use in the cold, even with gloves on. It was cold enough theat I could barely rotate the ball-head on my tripod.

I was able to manipulate the ISO and Shutter Speed dials with my gloves on without any major issues. I found that I had to remove my gloves to go into the menu system, but it wasn't a huge deal. I had no issues articulating the LCD screen when out in the cold. I was using my Wasabi Power batteries (from BlueNook on Ebay) and found that the X-T1 battery life was nearly on par with my D700. I generally leave the display on the LCD on when doing landscape stuff and found that during my morning excursion (generally out of my vehicle for about half an hour and then in the vehicle for 15 minutes) I only exhausted one battery by the time I got home. One thing I did notice was that the LCD does get quite laggy with the cold weather, just as it did with my D700.

I found that with the camera and lenses being all metal they get pretty painful to handle without gloves on. The one thing that worried me a bit was the lens hoods given that they were plastic. Since I was using filters I ended up taking the hoods off and leaving them in my bag as I was worried about how brittle they seemed to get in the cold. I know that some people are very worried about moisture and put things in plastic bags, but I have never had any issues just throwing my camera back in the bag--same applies to the X-T1; no issues at all with moisture when going from a cold to warm or warm to cold environment.

All in all I'm very satisfied with the X-T1 for landscape shooting in the cold. Here are some of the shots from that morning of shooting, all edited in Lightroom with VSCO. Exif info should be intact: