Frozen Photos [RESOLVED, PLEASE LOCK]

Passerbye

It's the first snow day of the winter so I went out and about to take photos. I was out for about 2 hours with my Canon PowerShot A520. I've had the camera for maybe 3 years now, IIRC. Most of the time it was in my relatively warm pocket, rather than in the 30 degree cold. I'm trying to access the photos now and the camera keeps turning off. I'd suspect the batteries were dead, only it's not giving me the usual 'change batteries' message and there was no low battery icon showing the last time I turned the camera off. I'm recharging the batteries now to make sure it's not them, but I'd like to know what other possible problems there could be.

tl;dr - Canon PowerShot A520 beat'd by cold? Batteries are already being checked.

Thanks in advance, I hope y'all are having a nice winter.

Hevach

Are the stored internally or on a card? My A470 doesn't have any internal storage, so on the assumption that it's all on the card, do you have an SD card reader? My laptop has a slot for them built in, but you can get USB readers fairly cheap.

Worst case scenario, if the camera's lost, the card is more likely to have survived.

Other than that, take all normal wet electronics precautions - I'd worry less about cold than snow. If a bit got in your pocket or even on the outside of your pants around the pocket and melted, that'd be bad. I actually had a cell phone die on me because it was in my pocket while I ran the snowblower.

phoxphyre

If the camera was going from warm to cold a bit, then condensation may have formed on its insides. Or it may be very cold on the insides. Putting very cold equipment in a warm room can cause it to warm up too fast and damage itself.

My advice would be to put the camera in a jar of rice, in a cooler part of your house, and let it dry out/acclimatise. If it's the former, *don't put it in the hot water cupboard*. If it's the latter, a couple of hours should be fine.

Good luck!

Passerbye

Good news! It just needed to thaw a bit apparently, it's doing fine now. Probably just too cold to work properly somehow. I know it didn't get wet because the pocket it was in was water proof and I made sure to brush snow away whenever it got onto the camera or my gloves. *phew* I was going to be sad if my camera had died.

Thanks guys for your help.

Mods, you can lock this thread now.