Tip of the Day – Shooting Snow

Joys of the Season to you and yours. I know we’ve been on a roll with the Dead Presidents but winter prompts an important photography tip. One of the most spectacular weather events to photograph is snow. Whether it’s your kids frolicking in it or just capturing how it coats the earth and transforms a scene, there are lots of opportunities to create keeper images.

In the Woods Behind the House, Columbia, MD (10 December 2013)

I’ve been taking pictures for half a century and I still need to be reminded of this important fact of life when you take pictures of snow: you need to OVER-expose pictures of snow scenes.

Modern camera’s AUTO or default exposure metering is calibrated to integrate all the possible colors in the picture...the people, sky, ground, trees. Your light meter then averages them together into a proper exposure recommendation. All the blended colors make the entire scene a modest shade of gray. That’s why serious old-timers used to carry around an 18% gray card. They would meter the light that reflected off the card to set the proper exposure on their cameras...back when cameras were simple light-capture boxes that focused your scene on film. Now we have light meters built into cameras. While the AUTO setting works to bring out most of the colors properly, a scene that is mostly white will be darker and dull, dull, dull.

My Deck After a Big Snowfall (6 February 2010)

Here is what our back deck looked like after the big Super Bowl dump of 2010. Beck was stuck in New Orleans when the Saints won the Big One [poor thing...all that celebration to put up with] and I was stuck in the house on a street that wasn’t going to be plowed for three days. I thought I’d pop off a few shots of the accumulation and did not think to compensate for the white snow. It did not help that it was overcast but the regular meter setting made the snow too dark.

I don’t know much about all the features that are now available on today’s point-and-shoot cameras. I understand some have exposure options that include a ‘snow’ setting. That will do what people who understand the MANUAL controls on the camera know is required…overexpose snow scenes one or two aperture stops. That means if your AUTO metering says a scene is ‘properly’ exposed with a lens opening of f/11 and a shutter speed of 1/250 second, you should reduce the f-number to f/8 (one stop) or f/5.6 (two stops). The same result can be achieved by slowing the shutter speed to 1/125 (1 stop) or 1/60 (two stops).

Fortunately, most digital cameras, especially the DSLR’s (digital single lens reflex) have a feature called exposure compensation. Set that to +1 or +1.5 and every picture will be overexposed enough to make the snow white. However, you’ll need to remember to turn off exposure compensation when you come inside or are no longer shooting snow scenes. These pesky cameras do have controls to make shots better BUT [a] you need to remember to employ them and [b] you have to stop using them when they are no longer applicable.

For example, there is the issue of white balance. When I got my first DSLR in 2005, I would try to dutifully use each white balance setting where I was shooting...and sometimes forgot to change it for the next situation. Let’s just say an artificial light setting in the snow will give you the blues.

Winter Blues (12 February 2006)

On the other hand, the neat thing about digital imagery is that you can fix many mistakes. There are brightness and contrast controls AND you can remove all the color to turn an image into a black and white photo. If the scene has no people or is just snow and trees, like this one, make it black and white or ‘grayscale’, as some programs call it and it will look more natural.

Winter White (16 February 2006)

This tip also applies to beach scenes, especially the sugar white sands we find on some southern shores. If you want bright scenes to look natural, you need to overexpose the pictures a bit.

I wish you the best light and perfect exposures in the New Year.