Winter Photography | Tips Shooting in The Snow
© 2012 Wazari Wazir | Winter Photography in Kashmir | February 2012
© 2012 Wazari Wazir | Snow White | Winter in Kashmir | Adobe Photoshop Camera RAW | 24mm | ISO 200 | 1/640 | f/8
Exposure can be very critical when shooting snow, most of the times your camera meter tend to underexposed the picture because your camera think that there is large white area in the frame and needs to underexposed to get a proper exposure. It is not adviseable shooting snow using Auto Mode, it doesn’t matter whether you are using Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority of or fully Program Mode. All this metering will fool your camera metering system.
Yes you can still use all the Automatic Mode that your camera offer but you need to make some exposure compensation, meaning that you really can’t depend totally on your camera metering system, most of the times, people will overexposed a little bit from what your metering suggest but for me the best way is to look at your camera histogram, this will give you better result. Try to exposed your snow scene “close to the right” in the histogram but not touching the wall. If you let the histogram to touch the wall (refer to the ACR above), the snow area will lost its details and once the details is lost, there is no way you can get it back during editing.
As you can see from the picture above, I manage to bring back some of the details during post processing, because the details is there and I need to do some editing to bring it back but if I were to exposed this photograph until the histogram touch the wall, I mean hitting the end of the histogram box to the right, the details will be lost and it doesn’t matter whether I shot RAW or JPEG, when the details is lost, it can’t be recovered.
Normally people use exposure compensation during film days, the reason is that they cannot see the result, but they know that if they use the same setting when photographing normal subject which doesn’t have big exposure difference like snowy area, they will get underexpose image, so they need to overexposed a little bit when photographing snow and to those of you who have shot film before knows that, it is better to shoot overexposed than underexposed because overexposed negative hold more details than underexposed negative.
Now with digital camera in our hand where we can see the result immediately, we don’t really need to “guess” about exposure, see the result, zoom in the photograph in your viewfinder and look whether you can still get the details of the snow and the best thing that you can do is, to use Histogram, exposed to the right but remember never let it touch the wall, as close as possible to the wall but never touch it and believe me, you can get back the details when editing. Believe me, there is no part blowing out or burn out in this picture, all the details are there.
*If you wanted to master shooting with natural light, you might wanted to check this eBook : Mastering Natural Light Photography
