Photographing Snow

TelePaul

Taking a few photos in the snow over the next few days, was wondering if you guys could give me a crash course in winter photography and shooting in snowy environments. I understand that typically in winter, the sun is at a lower angle to the earth and casts longer shadows but I'm not entirely sure of the full implications of this.

helios

Remember as well that the snow will be highly reflective so while the snow may expose correctly, everything else will be underexposed. Was recently doing some snow shooting myself and I ran into the same problem.

DaireQuinlan

And snow is white (hopefully ! not ... uhh ... yellow or anything) so remember to OVERexpose to get the correct exposure on the snow. A reading taken off snow will be underexposed by default because the meter will (as always) presume that its metering off a 15% gray tone.

Alun

Yes, over expose but don't overdo it. On my dogsledding adventure in Sweden last year I found by trial and error that +0.5 to +1.0 was about right ... +1.0 if the scene was predominantly snow, and +0.5 if there was other stuff in there like people or trees (or dogs in my case!). Also white balance was a bit off sometimes, resulting in a bit of a blue cast but if you shoot in RAW you can get rid of that pretty easily.

Is it somewhere really cold you're going? If so, there are precautions to be taken when moving the camera into and out of warm places from the cold outdoors. Basically if you take a cold camera into a warm mountain hut, it'll mist over with condensation. If you then take it back out into the cold too soon, the condensation will freeze. So, either wait until the camera has demisted itself before taking it back out again, or make sure it's in a sealed bag when you take it indoors. Personally I found no problems with the camera itself due to cold alone .. it (a Nikon D70s) managed one particularly cold day at -36 celsius no problem at all.

5uspect

Exposure lock zoomed on on the subject with spot metering and then recompose maybe?
Also shoot in RAW if possible so you can recover some of the blown out snow you know you're going to get.

ThOnda

+EV corrections and colour balance, colour balance and colour balance.
It's so easy :-)

magicbastarder

carry a grey card if you can.

TelePaul

Thanks alot guys I'll use the exposure comp. Not sure if I've used it before, should be fun! I'm going to Bavaria, don't imagine it'll be excessively cold. I should have got a grey card but it's a little late now. I was thinking of keeping the camera inside my clothes - or one layer of them at least.