in Your Camera You’re back in your car trying to warm up with the heater on full blast the next instant. You reach for your camera and try to play back the images when you suddenly notice that the viewfinder is different. Nearly white appears to be the center. Your lens appears to be covered in a layer of fog, so it’s not a problem with the viewfinder at all upon closer inspection. You can see it as you try to remove it by looking into the front element of your lens.
However, the fog remains stationary. It becomes immediately apparent that the fog is deep within the elements, a location that requires disassembling the entire lens before you can access it. Even though it may seem like the end of the world, your camera is not destroyed, and landscape photography should not be put on hold just yet. You are about to learn a very important science lesson that will help you use and care for your camera better from this point on. It is not fog at all that you have observed inside your camera. Actually, it’s a condensation layer. Condensation is the opposite of evaporation. In contrast to vaporization, in which water molecules change from a liquid to a gas, condensate water changes back into a liquid in the air. When the temperature or humidity of the air changes dramatically, you’ll find moisture inside your lens. It can happen when you go inside after being outside in the cold, when you take your camera from a relatively cool place like a hotel into a hot, humid geothermal area, or any time your camera is exposed to weather conditions like rain, sleet, or random spray from a waterfall. Condensation typically occurs when the air inside your lens cools below its “dew point,” which is the outer casing. Simply put, the dew point is the temperature at which the air inside your lens can no longer hold all of the water vapour, necessitating the liquidization of some of it. As a result, the water vapor returns to moisture, resulting in beading and fogginess on your lens’ internal components.
