Hopefully spring will be here soon, but for those of you who still live in snow country (uh, NOT me, tee hee…daffodils & cherry trees are blooming here!) you probably haven’t seen the last of the white stuff. I love to take pictures of children playing in the snow, and I know you do too, so I thought I might give you  a big tip on how to get good colorful pictures in the snow. I’m going to use a picture that my friend Lisa sent me of her 3 very cute little boys:

Using her camera’s automatic settings, the snow is kind of gray & the image is dark. Why? Because cameras meter the whole scene and automatically adjust the overall exposure to a neutral gray. Most of the time that works pretty well for general pictures, say if this was taken in the summer in a field. In this case, the camera "saw" all the white snow and toned it down – but by doing that, it actually underexposed the image.

How can you get around this? Well, some of the newer cameras actually have a "beach" or "snow" setting on them, and that would help a lot. Or you can purposely overexpose the image by using your exposure compensation button (looks like +/-), or by shooting on manual mode & overexposing (what I do).

But when it’s already captured, you can also fix it in a photo adjustment program to make it look better. Here is how it looked after I played with it a little:

The best way is to get it right straight out of the camera. So, next time it snows, grab your camera & the sleds and have some fun practicing!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Lake Keowee SC Photographer, Portrait Photographer Seneca & Salem SC, South Carolina Family Photographer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.