Winter wonderland

I posted a couple of tips on Twitter last Friday for taking photographs in the snow.  You can see the actual posts here and here (and while you’re at it, feel free to follow me too).  They were simple suggestions for getting white balance and exposure correct when photographing snowy scenes – two things that your camera is certain to get wrong if you leave it in automatic mode.  Yesterday, despite thinking I wouldn’t be venturing far from home, I got the chance to try out my own tips with a walk around a beautifully white Marley Park.

The basic problem with your camera’s attempts to accurately capture snowy scenes is that it simply isn’t programmed to expect so much white in one frame.  The abundance of white interferes with the algorithms that the camera uses to automatically determine exposure and white balance in particular.

To overcome these issues you need to take control by exposing and setting the white balance manually, or at least nudge the camera in the right direction.  For the exposure, as I wrote about a couple of days ago when I posted the photograph of Frosty the snowman going skiing, its a matter of adding some positive exposure compensation, which effectively deliberately “overexposes” the shot, to compensate for the fact that the camera wants to naturally underexpose the white snow to a light grey.  For this shot I applied a stop of exposure compensation – how much to use is hard to quantify, but a stop is a good starting point for a snowy scene like this.

The white balance is a little more awkward to get right in-camera, so there are two options.  Firstly, you can take a test shot of something that is a neutral grey, white, or black (your camera bag, a grey card, or even a clean patch of snow might work), and use that to set a custom white balance in the camera by following whatever procedure your camera uses to do this – most digital SLRs will support this.  The less cumbersome way, which I use, and which doesn’t interrupt the flow of your shooting, is to shoot in RAW and fix the white balance in post-processing.  You use much the same approach, by picking an area in the frame which you know to be pure white, black or grey, and the post-processing software uses this to set the white balance for the rest of the frame.  The benefit of this approach is you can tweak the final white balance to taste so you get a look that you like.

For instance here, the white balance is probably a tad off for the foreground snow, which has a hint of blue, but if I set this correctly I find the background going warmer than I like, so I went for of a compromise.