Paths in the Snow: on photographing snow February 15
Snow is a problem– it’s white. So if you’re trying to use an automatic exposure system to expose a scene that’s mostly snow, it tries to expose the snow as “gray”.
The way auto-exposure works is to try to make the scene average out to a middle gray. So you point your camera at the snow, press the shutter button, and you get a nice dark photo. Some of the more advanced metering systems will compensate for this, if there’s enough things that aren’t snow. And certainly if there is snow in the picture, but your kid is 80% of the frame, you probably won’t need to compensate. The trick to capturing scenes that are mostly white is that if you meter for the white, that white should be around 3 to 4 stops brighter than what you meter. 4 stops will make it blown out, or brighter than your camera’s sensor can see, and have no detail, but that’s where the really bright parts of the snow should be. The rest should fall within that stop, and then you’ll get nice detail and texture.
My camera lets me set an exposure-correction, generally for just such a situation. I can also bracket exposures, which is where the camera adjusts the exposure while taking several– this is often why you see photographers taking three shots right in a row. The first is the metered exposure, the second is as much as one or two stops “over exposed” and the third is one or two stops “under exposed”. (And now, if you used a tripod to take the pictures, you can put the photos together and get the whole range of exposure values).
What I found worked best working in the snow was to start with an exposure correction of around +1.5 (or one and a half stops brighter than the camera thought it should expose for). I also set the camera to bracket another +1.5 stops brighter (+3.0 stops total), just in case. The camera seemed to be getting pretty good readings when the scene was not all snow, but sometimes would try to meter entirely off the snow– so the second exposure was to deal with that.
Of course, if the camera was metering correctly, that second exposure was seriously blown out. But that makes for a nice orton effect.
