Proper Winter Exposure

Photography in winter has its own set of not only expectations, but problems and challenges that we have to deal with. Primarily, you've got a lot of white, you've got a lot of white, which means you're probably gonna encounter some exposure problems that you may not have had on shots at the beach where you've got combinations of dark hues and luscious colors. So in wintertime, it's not a question of turning your back on winter and saying I don't wanna shoot in a sea of white. I think the thing is is just understanding your exposure and taking the precautions necessary to get good winter pictures. Most cameras now have these settings in the camera, in the menu that are called the blinkies.

I absolutely love them. Others read the histogram, and see you can tell when you're clipping, when you've overexposed something to a point where there is no data. And so, with the blinkies, if you're overexposing something which means you're trying to get snow to look white, not the 18% gray that your meter is telling you it needs to be set at, you need to make sure that you're opening up your lens or increasing or decreasing your shutter speed to a point to where you're actually seeing snow as white. The blinkies enable you to do this instantly, as opposed to going back to the histogram. When you take a photograph of snow and a white scene and you've got sun hitting a particular spot and you take your shot and the blinkies are activated, it shows you where those highlights are because if it's overexposed, it flashes black, thus the blinkies in those areas where it's overexposed.

Now, I don't wanna misinterpret this usage of the blinkies because if you have a backlight situation and somebody's rim light is blinking, that's okay, you want that. But if it's something in your foreground, something that's an important part of the shot, if you see the blinkies, that means there's no data there, there's no information to recover photographically, and you probably want that in there. So then you stop down or you increase your shutter speeds to get rid of that exposure. So that's one of the things that you can do when you're out there. The other is to get up at sunrise or go out at sunset and get shots.

This morning, it was very, very cold out and we had our first clear crisp day when the sun came out. So out of here at sunrise this morning, it's 26 below zero, great time to come out and shoot. One of the things that's kinda cool about this kind of weather phenomena, very unusual things can happen. We're gonna snow shoe, through part of our morning this morning, we've got a pot of hot boiling water. Throw up a ladle of water and at 26 below, it vaporizes into powder.

So we've scooted down here at sunrise this morning to get shots of this because it's nice to have it back lit. But the great thing is that we can do a couple of shots of it back lit, and then we can just turn around and shoot a couple of it lit. So there's two options of doing it. The other, when I came down with the snow shoes, I just popped them in the snow this morning and look at this, look at this fabulous shadow. I'm just gonna sneak in on this this morning, get the sun behind it.

We got a great shot of some snow shoes out here at sunrise, 26 degrees below zero. Doesn't get any better than this. I'm gonna underexpose this shot because I want the shadows to really come through. And so I get down a little bit, I'm trying to get, the reason I'm inching here is I'm trying to get the sun right behind the snow shoe. It may or may not work, I kinda need to be closer to the snow shoes because I've got trees in the distance that are kind of drinking up a lot of that light that's underneath the snow shoes.

So I'm eventually gonna have to get closer to them, but it's the shadows that are so cool. So maybe what I'll do because I can't, they're disappearing in the sun, so what I'm gonna do is, oh, this is much better. Now the snow shoes are isolated against something. I'm still getting the benefit of the sun and the shadows, but I'm also getting a wonderful shot of the snow shoes without the obstruction of the trees, which were, the trees are behind, clear above, bright below. And then there was this middle gap of the trees in the distance that was kind of drinking in all of the light through the snow shoes.

I wanna see through the snow shoes, and that's what this is enabling us to do. Yep, looks fantastic. One of the things if you wanna do this, of course, you can always do this in post. But one of the things that I like to do here too if you've got a situation like this, you can go to your color balance, and I'm actually going to choose my own color temp. I'm gonna put it on 7600 Kelvin because that's gonna warm this scene up exponentially.

And that's kind of what I want, very cold, warm morning. So the combination of these two things, exposure, so you don't wash out the whites, shooting into the sun, deepening it so you bring out the shadows, you can see the playoff of light and shadow become compositional tools through exposure. It's a great way to be able to make sure that you're covering winter the way you wanna cover it and you're coming back with shots that look like snow and white.