Advice - taking pictures in the snow

[pikey]

Hello,

Like most of London I've been out taking pictures of the dog, snow and the dog in the snow this morning.

The results are rather disappointing as they look as though they're too dark. Using a flash improves things but then I run into problems with range and falling snow.

I'm comfortable using the camera in low light situations, but these snowy scenes have really confused me. I also use Picasa 'lucky' function which is quite good at "just fixing" a picture that's wrong but these scenes confuse that as well.

I understand that a black dog against a white background isn't the easiest thing for a camera to grab, but I'd like to understand the problem a little more. Can anyone shed some light as to what's happening and what I could try to improve?

Many thanks,

Ben

(The camera is a Sony A300)

Edited by pikey on Monday 2nd February 15:01

[andy-xr]

Check this out: http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

[Bernie-the-bolt]

You could always cheat

Edited by Bernie-the-bolt on Monday 2nd February 15:57

[gingerpaul]

I think it's just that the camera looks at the scene and doesn't think everything should be white and so adjusts the exposure to make the snow grey. You can use the exposure compensation to add a stop or two or you can go use full manual mode and set everything up yourself. Try taking a few pictures letting more light in each time and work out where you need to be to get the pictures you want.

If your camera has a live histogram then try using that too. I find that it can be quite useful to make sure you're not over exposing. It's worth just experimenting until you work out how your camera handles snow.

[DIW35]

The meter in a camera is designed to read a scene and make an exposure based on the scene averaging out to an 18% grey value. If your scene is predominantly white, your camera has no way of knowing this, and will expose as if the scene was averaging 18% grey. As a consequence, it is underexposing your snow scene. Conversely, if you were to take a real close up shot of your dog, the resulting image would be overexposed for the same reason.

When shooting a snow scene, you need to dial in some exposure compensation (assuming your camera has that facility). I would suggest a start of +1 stop, and see how you go from there.

[gingerpaul]

Following on from Bernie's post above, all the data is there for a reasonable picture, it's just a case of extracting it. If you've got Photoshop then it's worth experimenting with it to see if you can fix photos that don't turn out as you would have hoped. I know this because I have to do this a lot! (One day I'll get the hang of taking the picture I wanted in the first place.)

Edited by gingerpaul on Monday 2nd February 16:53

[VxDuncan]

I'm confused as to why there's so much vignetting on those images though... Big stack of filters on the end of the lens?

[pikey]

DIW35 said:

The meter in a camera is designed to read a scene and make an exposure based on the scene averaging out to an 18% grey value. If your scene is predominantly white, your camera has no way of knowing this, and will expose as if the scene was averaging 18% grey. As a consequence, it is underexposing your snow scene. Conversely, if you were to take a real close up shot of your dog, the resulting image would be overexposed for the same reason.

When shooting a snow scene, you need to dial in some exposure compensation (assuming your camera has that facility). I would suggest a start of +1 stop, and see how you go from there.

Thanks. Interesting.

[pikey]

VxDuncan said:

I'm confused as to why there's so much vignetting on those images though... Big stack of filters on the end of the lens?

Nope. Just this with nothing on the end http://www.sony.co.uk/product/ddl-carl-zeiss-lense...

[pikey]

I had a bit of a play with the remainder. Uploaded here.

Still not achieved what I wanted to.

I hope the same conditions exist tomorrow so I can try out the suggestions.