This was Difficult!

When I came upon this scene the difficulty I feared was not an issue. The difficulty was one of technology. My main camera body a flagship model of a major manufacturer. The latest upgrade was an electronic shutter. It was -20˚F when I headed out into the pre-dawn light. Even though I had kept the body within the layer of my outerwear after the first exposure that was it, nothing. I checked the film advance lever making sure it had full advance to the next frame. Still nothing. After a brief meltdown I went into my gear bag and found another battery and swapped it out, placing the bad one in my pocket. Boom, back in business. I advanced to the next frame and setup another composition. Depressed the shutter button and nothing. Crap, that’s a new battery. I did the only thing I could exchanging the battery from my pocket that had been resting for several minutes. I lifted the camera to my eye again recomposing the last failed exposure, and click. Success. But on the next exposure again, nothing. Slow and monotonous but workable. As you can tell from my image I’ve entered here the temperature couldn’t have risen much. Still somewhere between dawn and early morning light. It was still cold. Neither my subject nor I were going anywhere fast. Due to the difficulty of what appeared to be battery fatigue due to the cold I developed a rhythm of waiting to swap out the batteries in-between compositions rather than exposures. Minimizing the stress in the cold and maximizing the warming between batteries. What would have been a minor annoyance was a big pain in the butt due to at -20˚ I had to do these battery exchanges without gloves.