Well, Christmas came and went and now a new year is again upon us and with it more snow has arrived. I'm in two minds on the stuff myself, on the one hand if you get some nice sunny weather following snowfall (rarer than you might think) then this does offer me some great potential to capture some truley unique and very saleable photographs. On the other hand, it does make getting around very difficult and trust me it's very frustrating to have a number of cracking locations up your sleeve for just these conditions but be uable to get to them because the road is like a skating rink. I am hoping that there will be an opportunity for capturing some more images like those I managed of the Kennet valley last month if the sky clears and I can dig the car out of the foot of snow that is currently blocking it in. Take a look at the photos in my recent images gallery by clicking this link -
http://archive.visionsofbritain.com/c/visionsofbritain/gallery/Recent-Images/G0000PxAz9xOCF.g
As I promised in my first blog, I will share with you a few hints and tips that I hope will improve some of your own picture taking. Seeing as the theme for this blog is snow, I thought that some advice on photographing snow scenes would be appropriate. Snow requires a little more care and thought about exposure settings before you just set the camera to automatic and fire away. How many of you have done just this before and (particularly in the days of film where no instant feedback was available) been disappointed by the results as the pictures all seem to be underexposed and dark? Well, that's because the camera's in built light metering system is misleading to you when it takes a light reading and sets the exposure value for you. You see, the camera is looking to employ settings that will ensure that whatever subject you have pointed at, and asked the camera to meter the light reflected off of that spot, is rendered as a mid-tone, ie, a tone in the mid range of the colour spectrum such as a mid grey or red. When you point the camera at your nice bright white snow scene, the metering system sees the snow as a mid-tone and therefore employs settings that will under expose the image. But how do you go about compensating for this? For those of you that have a DSLR or an advanced compact camera that allows some maunual control over exposure settings, then you can look for the exposure compensation function (or allow some compensation manually if shooting in the manual mode) As a rule, I would experiment with settings that allow +1 to +2 stops of light (this is how it will be displayed in your camera settings menu) but remember that this assumes that you will be taking readings from the snow. If you piont the camera ata mid-tone such as a red jacket, then your shot will likely come out over exposed. For those of you with no manual control over your cameras, then look for some thing that is a mid-tone in your scene and point your camera at that and lock the exposure settings by depressing the shutter button halfway, then re-compose your shot and press the button all the way to capture the image (remember that by locking the exposure values in this way you will also set the point of focus) For a more in depth explanation of exposure, you may find that the following link is useful -
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-metering.htm
I hope to share some more of my own (correctly exposed!) snow pictures from this current bout of cold weather with you next time.
