Earlier this month we had our first snow storm. I took pictures of my kids in the snow and I was pretty disappointed.
I set my camera to aperture priority. These photos were all taken at F4 with an exposure of 1/320, 1/250, and 1/200 of a sec.
I have gotten great snow pictures on sunny days even with my point and shoot, but on this dark overcast day it just didn’t work.
Yesterday we went up to Lake Tahoe to go sledding for the day. In the afternoon the clouds rolled in and it got a bit dark again.
Again, I set my camera to aperture priority. I set it to f2.5, and the camera chose 1/250 sec as the shutter speed. And again, it is too dark, or underexposed.
This time I checked the photo on the back of my camera and saw that it was too dark. So I dialed over to full manual and decreased the shutter speed to let in more light. And here is what I got!
Do any of you have problems with snow photos being underexposed on a cloudy day? My guess is that the white snow reflects so much light that the light meter on the camera thinks there is too much. But that leaves people’s faces too dark. The lessons I learned yesterday are 1) check your photos on the back of your camera, especially in tricky light situations and 2) cloudy days in the snow might need more light then your camera thinks.
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