THE THINGS I DO…

Living in the part of Virginia that seldom, if ever, sees any significant snowfall, I have been asked by several of my regular photo walkers to give some of my tips for shooting in the snow. What follows are some tips for making better snow pictures and dealing with the effects of cold weather on your gear.

If your photo has more than 3/4 of the image taken up by snow, OVERexpose your image by 1 to 2 f/stops. Use the exposure compensation button if you are shooting in the auto or semi-automatic exposure modes or simply open the lens to let more light in if shooting manual. Even with the modern exposure algorithms, most snow shots made following the camera’s meter will result in gray snow. The compensation I suggest will at least get you in the ball park. Thankfully, digital photography has allowed us to see our images immediately after exposure…allowing any changes to be made on the spot. Keep in mind here that you only need to compensate if you have a lot of snow in your photos. If you’re shooting a tight portrait out in the snow, you probably don’t need to compensate for the snow (the meter isn’t seeing it).

Try not to change lenses if the snow is flurrying around you. For some reason, changing lenses when snow is in the air can attract stray flakes onto your camera’s imaging sensor. Shooting in the cold is difficult enough and the last thing you want is a stray flake coming to rest on your sensor! So, if you do have to change a lens, bend over the camera and use your body to shield it as you make the change.

Keep your batteries warm! Cold batteries are less efficient than warm ones and will not last as long as a set that has been warming in a pocket close to the body. Don’t shoot with cold batteries, they’ll drain faster. Warm them first before inserting in your camera. Carry an extra battery pack and keep it warm in a pocket.

Another exposure tip for those using point-and-shoot cameras: if your camera has an auto setting for beach or snow, use it! That setting will do the exposure compensation I mentioned earlier for you. By the way, sand will give your camera the same exposure challenges as snow…both are bright lighting conditions that need similar exposure adjustments.

When finished with your shooting (and this is more important the longer you’ve been outside in the cold), but your cold camera and lenses into a large plastic ziploc bag BEFORE coming in where it’s warm. This will prevent moisture from collecting on the outside of your camera and potentially shorting out the camera’s electronic innards. The plastic bag will get cold and cause condensation on the outside of the bag instead. When the bag is warm, you can remove your camera.

Speaking as one who has fallen in the snow, don’t take more gear than you really need. A camera body and a couple lenses are easier to protect if you slip on an icy patch.

Take plenty of memory cards with you to keep from running out of storage space when things get interesting.

Rely on your histogram view to guide your exposure (if your camera allows you to view it). Remember, your histogram will tend to have less info in the middle and more on the left side and right since your snow shots will contain a lot of highlights (the snow!) and shadows. Look at a histogram of a well-exposed snow scene and us it as a guide for other similar scenes.

So, keep warm and try my tips the next time you have a chance to go play in the snow!

Sometimes, shooting from a different angle will open your eyes to a new composition you had never thought of before. During a recent vacation to the Asheville, NC area, I was chasing some spectacular cloud formations across the sky, trying to find an interesting foreground to use to frame my shot. While clouds can sometimes make great photos by themselves, I was looking for something to remember my vacation by and was in search of something interesting to put in the foreground. We found this little historical park at the site of the old Zeb Vance homestead and seeing this combination of old log homes and rustic fences caused me to swerve into their parking lot.

I was using my circular polarizer to give me a spectacular blue backdrop for the clouds (and to add more saturation to the greens), but I still wasn’t happy with the shot…that is, until I bent down to get a different lens from my bag. Looking up from that low angle, I saw this mirrored composition of the spit-rail fencing against the mountains in the distance and immediately had an “aha!” moment. I swapped lenses (I used a 24-70mm zoom for this) and got down to ground level. I mean all the way down! Lying on my side, I fired off 10 or 15 shots. In a few minutes, the clouds moved on and so did I…happy that I took the “low road” to get this photograph.

A gorgeous cloud-filled sky gave me a reason to get outdoors and play around with over-saturating landscapes.

To get this particular effect, I used my circular polarizer to make the sky as blue as possible and then underexposed a stop-and-a-half to make sure I would have enough detail in the clouds. I shot this as a raw file, to make sure I would have a lot of flexibility in toning the clouds and to make the next part of the process easier. I opened this image in Lightroom 2 (have I ever told you how fantastic this program is?) and, after doing basic toning to bring out the maximum detail in the clouds, I bumped up the saturation of the blues and greens…a lot.

Once I had adjusted the color to match reality, I took the settings an additional 20 points to the right on the Lightroom saturation slider for these two colors to over-saturate things even more. The resulting over-saturated image is much more eye-catching than had I not used a polarizer and a little software “help” after the fact.

Go try it for yourself the next time you have a cloud-filled, beautiful sky. Don’t worry if you don’t have Lightroom 2, you can accomplish the same color tweaks using the Adobe Raw plug-in and Photoshop. Make your adjustments within Adobe Raw using the controls under the “HSL/grayscale” tab. Have fun learning this new technique!

The answer is quite simple: it’s the camera you have with you when you need to capture that memorable moment!
That’s right, the answer isn’t necessarily Canon, Nikon, Olympus or even your cellphone camera. If you don’t have a camera with you when you see that shot of a lifetime, you’ll only be able to describe the photo you almost made.
No camera, no pictures, it’s that simple. It doesn’t matter what brand…as long as it has a lens and can record an image.

Think about that fact the next time  someone wants to engage in a little “my camera’s better than yours” banter with you.

At a recent photo walk, one of the participants pulled me aside and expressed his frustration at not shooting lots of “keeper” images during group photo outings. He was visibly irritated with his performance (or lack of) and it was pretty obvious that he was not enjoying himself. Since the whole point of a photo walk is to enjoy yourself, I gave him some words of advice that kept me from chucking my gear in a bin years ago… take things one step at a time and always remember how far you’ve come, not how far you have to go. You see, digital photography can be both as simple or as complex as you want to make it. Be careful not to try too many things at once, especially when you’re learning the basics.

Someone once told me “there’ll always be greater and lesser people than you out there, the trick is to accept that fact and do your best with the tools at hand.” Applied to digital photography, it means set small goals for yourself at every step in your photo evolution. Goals such as “I’m going to use the manual exposure settings for half the photos I shoot today” or “I’m going to experiment with at least one HDR image” are easy to set and, once achieved, will give you a real sense of accomplishment. Stack one accomplishment onto another, then add another and you’ll soon see how much your skills are improving.

I set small “fun” goals for myself all the time. Last weekend, I hosted a photo walk and, knowing I would be tied up helping folks with their photography and making sure everyone was having a great time,  set only one goal for myself. I wanted to make one good photograph…something I could frame and hang on my wall. No stress, just one photo. After walking through the park for a couple hours, I missed several shots, let other possibilities pass me by for one reason or another. No pressure, I only needed one shot, right? As I was leaning on the railing, taking a break after the walk down to the swamp bridge, the shot I was looking for happened right in front of me. That’s when I shot this photo:

Knowing I had this shot “in the bag,” I relaxed a bit and focused my attentions (pun intended) on helping other photo walkers for the rest of the morning. I didn’t stop looking, mind you (see my previous post on why you don’t want to do that), but my main photographic goal for the day was accomplished. As I look at the framed photo over my Mac, I’ll always be reminded of the fun I had hosting this photo walk, thanks to setting my goals to “minimum” for the day. Remember, if photography stresses you out, you’re doing something wrong!