Excelsus Photography

During a snowstorm at the end of January, 2010. I got out to take some shots of things in the snow. Here are some of those shots. Note: these shots aren't great, and do have some issues. But, I wanted to use these to talk about taking photos in the snow.

Close-up of juniper tree during snow. The shutter is fast enough to catch snowflakes falling but slow enough to cause enough blur to give illusion of motion

A common mistake many people make when taking photos in the snow is that they underexpose. The issue is that the light meter in your camera is set to average the light reading to 18% gray across the entire shot for every shot. This is fine most of the time. However, if you shoot a scene of mostly snow, it is going to cause the snow to look gray. The parts that are not snow are going to look darker, and details in the darker parts will get lost. The image is going to be underexposed. To compensate for this, you should set the E/V on your camera to make the camera expose more. The EV is usually adjusted by a button or menu option marked with a "+/-". Here is a general guideline:

• +1.0 EV: Open area under overcast, or shady area under open sun
  
• +2.0 EV: Cloudy bright conditions.
  
• +3.0 EV: Open area under bright sunlight

The other thing to realize, and this isn't limited to snow, is that having great light with great warm color helps the photograph. If the color of the light from the sky is gray, colors of objects will be muted, and the whites will be gray (which is an issue if the sky and snow is in the same frame, either both will be white or both will be gray). However, if you shoot with the sun out, and around sunrise or sunset, with a nice warm yellow light, you will have nice warm colors in your photograph. When I shot these photos, I did not have good light.

gray sky still means gray snow. EV was set to +1.3

converted color image to black and white