Snow at sunset

Well it looks like by the time you read this most or all of the snow will be melted away and we’ll be back to our usual dreary winter weather.  Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on who you ask – personally, I quite enjoyed the snow much more than I’m likely to enjoy the rain that we’ll probably be stuck with for the next two months.  I’m just glad now that I got out in it on Saturday.  Today’s photo is another shot from that walk around Marley Park.  More details on it, plus a link to a slideshow of more images which I tweeted yesterday in lieu of a blog post, if you read on.

I discussed in my last post the technicalities of getting snow photographs right in-camera, and indeed similar types of issues arise when photographing sunsets, or a near-sunset sky.  Similar, but sometimes conflicting. So when the sun began to dip behind the trees at Marley on Saturday I had to try to get a good exposure for both the white foreground and the heavily backlit background, while aiming to maintain detail throughout the scene.  With the backlighting silhouetting the trees, this was a tug of war between underexposure and overexposure, and inevitably something was going to have to give.   The compromise I chose is apparent in the image above, which has a sky which is almost blown out.

I say almost, because actually there’s a hint of that sunset colour there – more a consequence of my white balance tweaks in post production, but something that helps the shot.  Better to have a vast area of pale orange-white than a vast area of pure white, no?  Maybe. Maybe not.

Anyway, I was more concerned about the foreground when determining the exposure for this shot, and by spot-metering and over-exposing what the camera thought was right I could put “Snow Photography 101″ into action and retain detail in the snow and also expose the water nicely.  The bonus is that the water nicely reflects the sky, and somewhat compensates for the lack of detail in the actual sky.   The exposure is held just enough to keep definition in the branches of the trees against that sky also,  and the trees themselves aren’t silhouetted, with detail visible in the conifers.

Overall I’m happy with how this worked out, and feel I did as good as I could have done without going the HDR route.  If anything the bright sky complements the tone of the scene, and so here I hope I’ve gotten away with sacrificing the detail in the sky to save the rest of the shot.

To see more shots I took last Saturday (with accompanying music suited to the pictures) you can check out my Winter Wonderland slideshow (it’s less than 2 minutes long).  That’s probably it for snow pictures for now, but I can’t promise I won’t detail how I took a few more of them in the future, depending on how my winter photography progresses!