Sunny Winter Day

What a difference lighting can make to invoke a mood when viewing a photograph. The photograph to the left was taken at Busch Conservation Area on a sunny weekend morning a couple of days after a snowfall in the St. Louis area. Coming from Milwaukee, the snow in St. Louis is both less frequent and less heavy, so you take advantage of it when it falls.

You can tell this is a few days after the snowfall since the trees have no snow on them – the sun has effectively melted most of the snow.

Contrast the first photograph with this second photograph, taken at the same location, but on a different type of day.

Overcast Winter Day

The overcast sky invokes an entirely different mood when viewing this photograph. You can almost feel the cold – in contrast to the first one where the sun creates a warmer feeling. The tones in the first photograph are warm tones, while the second lacks any warmth at all.

Snow scenes can be difficult to shoot, since the automatic exposure control in most cameras is fooled by the sheer amount of bright, white snow.

The automatic exposure control does an excellent job of determining the overall light available in a scene, setting the correct exposure to get a correctly balanced photograph. With snow, however, the camera tries to average out the scene and is unable to, due to the pure whiteness of the snow. The result is often a gray snow instead of the bright white you saw when taking the photograph.

If your camera allows you to, the correction for this is to adjust the exposure by one full stop. This will let more light in and render the snow more accurately. Depending on the amount of snow in your scene, you may need to adjust the exposure control by more or less than one full stop. And with digital cameras today, it’s easy to experiment. Take the scene several different ways and see which one works best for the specific scene you’re capturing.

Click here for some additional photographs from Busch Conservation Area. The first set were taken on a sunny winter day, while the second set were taken on an overcast winter day.