Digital Advent Calendar 2010 - Day 21

Photographing Snow

We’ve been having a lot of snow recently so I thought I’d share a tip on how to ensure that the snow in your pictures is white rather than a dull grey.

The problem with snow, or any white subject, is that the light meter of your camera is fooled due to its reflectiveness.  What you need to do is to override your camera’s light meter and tell it to overexpose the base exposure.  This overexposure is necessary because a camera’s built-in light meter views neutral grey as the optimum exposure, so it will try and expose a scene to get the overall photo to equal neutral grey. So, when you have bright white, the camera will expose the scene to make the white grey by underexposing the photo.

If you have a compact digital camera, I suggest you search through the scene mode settings to see if you have a dedicated ‘Snow Mode’ which will adjust the settings automatically for you.  If you have an advanced digital compact, digital bridge or digital SLR camera you can dial in a +2/3 to +2 setting using the exposure compensation facility.  Just remember to adjust the compensation dial back to zero again once you’ve finished in the snow.

-Ben