Field notes
A winter in Thy with the 28 mm
Eleven weeks on the west coast of Jutland, one lens, and what the cold did to our battery numbers.
From the first week of December to the middle of February I lived in a rented summer house a few hundred metres behind the dunes near Hanstholm. I took one H1 in Graphite, the HV 28 mm, four batteries and no other lens. The idea was simple: find out what the camera is like after a season of real weather, not a week of testing.
The numbers
Over eleven weeks I made 4,912 exposures. The coldest morning was minus 8 degrees, with wind off the North Sea on most days. At that temperature I averaged 280 frames per charge, with the viewfinder on and stabilisation active. Indoors, the same battery gives well over the CIPA figure. Two batteries in an inside pocket and one in the camera was enough for a full day every time.
Early in the trip the battery indicator would sometimes drop suddenly from 20 to 5 percent in the cold. That was fixed by firmware 1.0.2 for most people, but I was running an older test body and saw it until I updated. The camera never shut down before the indicator reached zero.
Weather
The 28 mm and the H1 together are sealed, and I treated them that way: sleet, sand in the wind, salt spray on the beach at Vorupør. I wiped the camera with a damp cloth every evening and let it dry on a towel, not on the radiator. Nothing failed. The only casualty was the strap, which went stiff with salt and came back to life after a rinse.
The dials were the thing I valued most. With gloves on, I could set ISO and shutter without taking my eye from the finder.
One lens
Twenty-eight millimetres is wide enough for the coast and close enough for faces at 30 cm. I missed a longer lens twice, both times for birds. I did not miss it for anything else.
A selection of the pictures is in the sample gallery.