Taking Pictures in Snow


Adjust White Balance: Snow almost always messes up auto white balance of a camera and creates a bluish tint. For most cameras you want to change the white balance to compensate for the bluish cool tint. This can easily be done by changing the white balance mode to “cloudy” or “shade” which helps to warm up your pictures.

Exposure Adjustment: Because snow is white and bright with less contrast it may cause your camera to achieve incorrect exposure. This usually cause the pictures to be dark and underexposed. This problem can be solved by taking pictures in RAW format, which allows one to adjust exposure during photo processing on your computer. If RAW is not an option or you prefer jpeg use exposure compensation dial to increase exposure to +1 or more if there’s too much light.

Auto Exposure Lock / AEL: Sometimes snow can cause your subject to be dark because camera might be adjusting exposure based on the bright snow in your picture. In this situation, your picture comes out looking good except that your main subject is dark. You can correct this problem by using auto exposure lock which is available in most DSLR cameras and may be absent in point and shoot cameras. Lock the exposure on your subject by pressing AEL button and then frame your shot. This will allow you to have correct exposure of your subject in snow. Refer to your camera manual about how to do this or send me a message if you need me to do a tutorial on this.

Use Flash: You might think that there is a lot of ambient light bouncing of the snow all around you. But using a flash is very helpful in balancing out the bright reflective light from snow by filling up dark shades and shadows in you pictures.
Snow as a Background: Use snow to your advantage. Snow can create a great background for portraits. Use bright and contrasty colors for your subject and have white snow as your background.

Catch it First: Go out right after the snow before others make it messy by walking on it and leaving footprints or other tracks all over it. Catch the snow while it is pure and untouched unless you are trying to capture messy snow.

Camera and other equipments are expensive so please be extra careful when you taking pictures in snow.