Winter Photography Tips: Learn How to Photograph Snow and Shoot Perfectly Exposed Snow Scene Pictures Every Time!

Imagine a sweeping landscape covered in glistening white snow. The sky is blue, the bare trees are covered in frost, leaving long shadows along the white ground, just waiting for you to snap away with your camera. It sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? If you’ve ever tried photographing snow you know it comes with a range of challenges. From getting the exposure right to battling the short hours of day light and keeping your camera’s batteries from dying a death in the cold, snow photography isn’t as easy as it might first appear.

Winter can be a bleak time for photography. The days are short and the weather is cold and miserable. On a positive note, the low angle of the light suits many subjects and and the bare trees and vegetation means that wonderful views get exposed that you wouldn't normally see during the rest of the year. The snow and frost covers the landscape and subjects such as lone trees contrasts sharply against the white snow, and gets evenly illuminated as the snow reflects the light back from all angles. Still, photographing in the snow isn’t easy as the snow itself creates exposure difficulties.

If your snow photos end up looking grey and washed out, rather than the crispy white you were hoping for, you just need to take another look at your exposure settings. Because snow is white and reflects the light, the camera’s light reader gets fooled into under exposing your images. If you shoot your photos in raw, you can address the exposure problems after the shoot, but the best solution is of course to address the problem on site.

By using the exposure compensation button on your SLR camera, you can get your camera to ‘over exposure’ your snow photos, leaving the snow sparkling white. Start with a setting of +1, and test a couple of different settings until you’re pleased with the results. Alternatively, take an incident light reading and add one or half a stop more exposure to the camera’s light reading. If you have a compact camera, look for a setting specific for snow or water shots which lets the camera know it needs to over exposure the photos.

You can use a warm up filter to help correct the colour balance if you think your photos come out with overly blue shadows. If you have a digital SLR camera you can achieve similar results by trying different white balance settings, the shadow or cloudy settings are essentially acting as simple warm up filters.

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