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!

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!

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!

Don’t rush to delete your images. I constantly remind photographers never to edit in the field. When you delete your images during a shoot, you a tendency to toss photos you should have kept. I’ve regretted doing this enough times that it’s become second nature not to delete anything till much later. I don’t even recommend deleting images after the first edit is complete. Why? I’ve found too many good photos “hiding” in images that didn’t make the first cut well after the fact. Putting some time between your first edit and your “later” edit allows you to concentrate on the image, not the problems you may or may have had in getting it. 

Case in point is this photo of an osprey. This photo was missed in the first edit due mainly to the fact that the osprey was very small in the frame. This bird was really high overhead when I made this grab shot but, thanks to my Canon 5D’s full frame sensor, I was able to crop in to the bird and discover that it was carrying a large fish! The photo won’t win any contests due to the extreme crop, but I’m happy to add it to my personal collection of “found” photos anyway. I wouldn’t have found it had I deleted the images after the first edit.

So, don’t delete too soon. Storage memory is cheap. Hold on to your images for a while; then take a closer look — you might be surprised at what you find!

Having all the photo gear in the world won’t get that once-in-a-lifetime photo. It will help, but luck and planning will play a bigger part in whether you succeed or fail in getting “the shot”. Plan well and you’ll be ready when luck happens.

A great example of “planning for luck” happened during a recent vacation. I was staying at a state park adjacent to the Potomac River. Bald eagles were seen nearby. My self-assignment was to get photos of them feeding on the fish in the river.

I needed to come up with a plan.

I knew I’d need a long telephoto lens. I decided to use the loaner Canon 400mm f/4 DO lens I brought along as well as a 1.4X teleconverter. That would give me the equivalent of a 560mm lens on my Canon 5D DSLR. Knowing eagles fly high and far away from people, I hoped that would be enough.

I also needed to find where the eagles were active…and at what time of day. When shooting wildlife, it’s helpful to know their habits (day feeder vs. night feeder, etc.) and, of course, where they hang out. This can be the hardest part of the plan, especially if you don’t know the area. With binoculars in hand, I started watching the eagles. After a couple days, I had a good idea of where they caught fish as well as the location of their nesting area. I also noticed they were more active in the early morning hours.

With all that in mind, I decided to stake out a spot near their nests and wait for luck to happen. In getting ready for action, I set my camera to a high shutter speed (since I wanted to be able to react to birds from all directions, I left my tripod in the car and trusted a high shutter speed and image stabilization to keep things sharp). I chose 1/1250th of a second.

I also set the camera to manual and adjusted the exposure and color balance to match the morning light. I used manual metering because I figured I’d probably be shooting the birds against sky, woods and water and I didn’t want exposure errors caused by shooting against a bright sky or reflected water to ruin my shots. I also set the camera to RAW format to give me more flexibility in post-processing and set the autofocus to servo mode to better follow the birds. Manual focus is so…20th century!

So, with camera in hand, I waited. And waited. The morning light was glorious and there was a lot of activity on the river. I was afraid this activity would keep the eagles away and, as I was preparing to leave to find another location, a young male flew overhead. I tracked him for a couple minutes as he circled the river (he had spotted a fish) and, since I had everything ready, was set for what happened next!

I love it when planning and luck play nice together!