Just last week, monday 14th March we had a record snowfall in Tenerife. The snow reached way below Vilaflor (1500m highest village in Spain) and as such, was a most unusual event for this time of year, let alone having snow at some 900m!

Myself and Mike Bolognesi headed up to Teide on Wednesday night, 16th March hoping for some thick layers of snow. On these occasions the snow is accompanied by stormy weather and thus lots of clouds. That night conditions seemed pretty ideal since the sky showed to be clear thanks to the Teide webcams up there placed by Bradford Telescope in the UK.

Once up there, arriving a bit late, we found that most of the snow we hoped for had gone. Nonetheless the mixture of snow and rough lava textures did produce some interesting contrasts. The moon was some 80% illuminated and high in the sky. A suberb combination as the moonlight gets reflected lighting up the foreground, especially the snow. The atmosphere was very eerie as we could see perfectly well in the dark and the silence added to the spookiness. I quite enjoyed the serene tranquillity. Everything could be heard and we clearly perceived a big landslide on the las Cañadas ridge. The temperature was plummeting and lowest we registered was -6 Celsius.

We setup our tripods in Llano de Ucanca and could compose reasonably well. In that area the north star hovers directly over Teide´s nib so we were pointing straight at it with our cameras, a key element to a successful star trail just above Teide. I set my camera to 30 seconds at 200 ISO and aperture of f3.2with my Tokina 11-16mm f2.8.

Why f3.2 when the lens can open right up to f2.8?

You may be wondering this since its logical to capture more light but a wide open lens suffers from coma. Its where the edges will appear softer so its better to stop the lens down for more sharpness.

I set the camera to high speed and used a remote release cable set to bulb and leave for 1hr/ 1.5hrs in total. The result is that after each exposure the camera automatically takes a another shot without a break. This is important for a seamless, long star trail.

Important: Since batteries drain extremely fast in the cold check you have enough charged batteries with you, and if necessary bring a battery grip to extend battery time!

All seemed to go well apart from the freezing cold creeping in till mike started to notice that his lens was getting fogged up and icing all over. He had done a good 40mins worth of exposures and now his shots were ruined. I checked the front of my lens but all was good! We continued shooting and mike was cleaning and rubbing his lens to no avail. At first we thought it was his UV lens protect filter but no matter what he did it just wouldn’t stop. Soon enough the whole floor was glistening with frost and everything else followed. My whole camera was frosted but my front lens element was fine..

Eventually the only sound explanation we came up with was that it was covered by a thin film of salt water. I had been shooting the coastline earlier that day and hadn’t cleaned my lens whereas mike did. We searched the internet for solutions of all sorts but found nothing specific at all.

From: tenerifephotography.blogspot.com