Click Click! 039: Photographing snow, is it really white?

"Time to Ponder" F4 | 75mm | ISO 100

Every Wednesday of the week, I’ll share with you my moments of Photography in this Blog: “Click Click!” -Just a simple guy with a camera

Snow, snow and snow. Either you hate it, or love it when you live in the New England. In Boston, we received a total 27.6 inches of snow YTD in 2011 as of this writing. This upcoming Thursday, we are expecting another 9 to 10 inches of snow.  This will be ideal for this month’s photography challenge which is to capture snow, however…

More after the break:

…for I only taken a few photos in this long, unforgiving month.  My hands quickly turns into an icicle and my breath becomes dust.  I’m actually not too fond of taking photos in winter, however, this also gives me the pleasure to record these moments.

I think the most important thing to know in taking snow photos is Exposure Compensation. Your camera’s light meter doesn’t see color, it uses the different shades from white to black so that it can  properly expose the photo.  When you take a photo which composes a white subject,  it typically is gray. Why? Because it is the median between white and black.

So the one thing I learned is to add +1 (stop) Exposure Compensation to allow your camera to get more light which actually makes the snow white. Below are more photos from me, or Legna. Have some fun, the next challenge will be disclosed next week.

"Winter Sun" F2.8 | 1/500s| ISO 100

“Under the blanket” F3.5 | 1/8000 | ISO 1600 Source: Legna

If you have any questions or tips or like this article, please email me at rkwan@abccubed.com. Happy Clicking!

Thanks for all your submissions this week, shown below. If you didn’t submit this week, then don’t worry. Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for more challenges.