Finally, time for skiing

In the middle of December, as has happened for the last few years, a friend came to stay for a three week visit to our house.  He’s always wearing a smile and he always brings a set of skis.  We’ve tried to explain to him in the past that we rarely get skiing conditions where we live and that when we do it’s almost never at this time of year.  Nevertheless he persists in bringing his skis with him each year.  He stands looking out a window, hoping for snow, for most of his visit and inevitably leaves on the 6th of January a little disappointed.  This year, the day he was due to leave us for another year, Frosty’s persistence paid off.

His visit has been extended this year because the snow, which he has been waiting for all these years, has meant that he and our other Christmas decorations (including the real, but now sagging, tree) are likely to stay put until the weather improves a little.  So yesterday morning, with a nice sprinkling of snow in the back garden, Frosty headed out for his first ever ski in Dublin.

I photographed him as he assessed the ski area in our back garden (it’s mainly green slopes, though down near the shed there is one stretch of blue slope).  I wanted to isolate him from the background so used my 50mm lens at its widest aperture of f/1.8.  I had the ISO at 400 (for no particular reason – low enough to not have to worry about noise basically) and used aperture-priority metering to determine the shutter speed.  I had to be careful about metering with all that white in the scene.

Aside: Of course I didn’t “have to be careful” at all, what with the ability to see the shot on the LCD screen to assess the exposure after I had taken it, and the ability to reshoot if necessary.  Had I been shooting film, I’d have had to be careful.  But when I say that, I mean it in the context of wanting to get the shot correct in the camera – a good discipline, and also one that saves time later.

So, wanting to get the shot right in-camera, and recognising that the scene had a lot of white, I knew my camera would naturally underexpose the photo.  I therefore did two things to avoid this.  Firstly I switched to spot-metering, and metered on Frosty’s face.  This isn’t white, but a few shades darker, and so gets me closer to “proper” exposure.  Secondly, I added a stop of positive exposure compensation, which tells a camera in aperture-priority mode to open the shutter speed for twice as long as it thinks it should, and so add in twice as much light.  These two steps do a good job of keeping the whites white.

I had time to grab a few frames before Frosty headed for the slopes and I had to head to the office, but this wider shot showing him surrounded by snow, is my favourite.

I’m glad Frosty finally got the snow he needed to go skiing during his Christmas visit.  And I’m glad I was there to photograph it.