Re: Photography question. Can shooting video of welding damage the camera?

I haven't shot much welding in steam shops in the last 20 years or so, which is more of the digital age. I may have shot a little bit, with no damage to the camera.

However, back in the old days of video, the cameras all had tubes, until about the early 90's. These tube/s were very sensitive to bright lights. The early consumer/industrial cameras had a single tube that made all the colors.
There was a lot of red in those early ones. If you shot into a bright light, such as welding torches, or engine headlights, you could have something called "Tube Burns". Basically the light burned through the tube, and created a spot or streak on your image, which would show up on the tape.

When I got my first 3-tube cameras in 1986 we learned fast that you should keep the color bars switch on, or keep the cap on, to help prevent this. It could happen a lot, especially with engine headlights that were not moving, or were moving slowly in a zoomed-in shot or something similar. Sometimes it would occur when you shot the engine starting up. One such situation happened to me in 1987 while shooting snow stuff in Canada during February.
A train with an F-unit stopped at the station, and I forgot to put the bars on, or the cap, and the camera stayed on, yet the tape was not rolling. It didn't matter! When the train started up there was a black spot on the tape from the tube burn. There was little you could do about it. It would eventually go away with time, so sometimes we would leave the camera on when not shooting to help it out. I have a few shows where you see the burn spots, or even a weird streak that looked like a safety pin.

My next camera was a Betacam SP in 1992, and it used 3 chips instead of Tubes. The problem was pretty much cured with that. I believe its not much of issue with todays advanced technology. I would say if you are shooting a lot of this stuff to wear some eye protection, and you might want to change the filter on your camera, if you can do that. Also watch for streaking or smearing with the strobe effect.

Might be a good question to google to see if any one has had trouble with this type of video recording.

Greg Scholl
[www.gregschollvideo.com]