Shooting in snow.

Snow can be both a blessing and a curse. It can be a blessing, because it covers a multitude of dirt, garbage, dog poop and other sins that make your image look messy and complicated. It can be a curse, when your exposure is off and most of your image is a white blob.

The reason you get a white blob, is that you have part of your image that is too bright, typically the snow. This is usually referred to as a blown highlight, by the same token if it’s on the dark parts of the image it’s a blocked shadow. If you want some texture in your snow, you can intentionally under expose the image, which on most newer DSLR cameras can be done by setting the exposure to be 1 stop under. You need to be careful though that by underexposing the highlights, you don’t block up the shadows. If that is the case, you can always bracket your exposure taking one two stops under exposed, one at proper exposure and one over exposed, then use an HDR technique called tone mapping to combine the 3 images, the software that does this, needs a lot of computer horsepower, so you don’t want to do it on every image, with an older computer. Some cameras can be set to automatically bracket the exposure.

Few images need that much alteration, and often just taking the exposure and dropping a stop, will give the snow some detail, without affecting other parts of your image too much. Focus has some to do with it, if your depth of field leaves the snow out of focus, your going to get a white blob anyway, so you might just let it go.

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Since most of my stuff is B&W, and there is a decided lack of colour, I sometimes add a little to make things interesting, through the use of toning. This is digitally simulated these days, for a specific look. If you want an image to look warm you apply a brownish tone, like the sepia tone of 19^th and early 20^th century images. If you want a cold feel, you use a bluish tone. This weeks image has a very light bluish tone, intended to make it’s snow appear colder then it normally would. Different metals can be used, including iron, copper and gold, the colour of the metalic image doesn’t appear to be similar to the colour of the polished metal. This weeks image has a slight blue tone, to make it feel colder then it would as a standard black and white image.