Other techniques

I love the snow, I can hardly look at a snowy scene and not want to go out and play and take photos! But if you look around at many peoples' snow photos, even though the scenes may have looked great at the time, some of the photos look quite dull, boring and uninteresting. So what happened? Well here are the main reasons for those dull looking images:- Incorrect exposure Incorrect white balance Lack of colour No excitement or drama Incorrect Exposure If you've watched my film about Exposure Compensation, you'll know that your camera's metering system works by averaging out scenes to a mid gray tone. This usually works very well because many scenes have both light and dark area in them and so the average grey tone for the whole image is usually about right. But when there is a predominantly bright or predominantly dark are in the scene, the camera can be easily fooled. I think it's safe to say that snow is quite bright stuff, and so the camera sees all of that white snow and tries to tone it down a bit to average the scene out to a mid gray tone. Typical snow shot without changing exposure settings The easy way round this is to use some positive exposure compensation to brighten up the scene, usually about +1.0 or +1.5 works well. If you have a compact camera or you just prefer not to mess around with camera settings, just use the 'Beach' or 'Snow' scene mode, it may look something like this:- Incorrect White Balance Exposure The term Incorrect White Balance is perhaps a little strong, sometimes although an image [...]