Photographing snow might not seem that difficult. However, to get the best photos out of you camera, there are a few basic things you need to understand about you camera. With this knowledge, you will be able to take better photos than before, without the need to edit them.
The snow in this image appears slightly gray
Common issues
The reason that snow is difficult to photograph is that it is white. This does a few things with the software in your camera:
- It messes with the lightmeter
- It messes with the white balance
For this reason, the following things might happen when you photograph snow:
- The snow may appear gray instead of white
- The photo looks a bit too blue
To get the photograph that you want, there are certain things you can set within your camera that improve your photo overall. Of course, it is up to your creativity whether you actually want to use these settings.
Your camera makes the snow gray
As smart as your camera is when taking pictures, the light meter within you camera expects a picture to have a certain standard brightness. When photographing snow, or anything else white, the camera thinks that your photo is overexposed and will (in automatic modes) make the photo darker in order to compensate for the overexposure.
This lightmeter helps to correctly expose your images
The downside is, that you want to prevent this from happening when you photograph snow. The photo needs to be white instead of gray. Therefore, you need to tell your camera to make the photo a bit brighter. To do this, find the indicator of the brightness of the camera in your settings, and set the meter somewhere between +2 and +3. This way, the photo will be brighter, and snow will really be white!
Your camera makes the photo blue
This is something that the automatic white balance might do. To prevent this, you would do better to check different modes of white balance and set it to one that neutralizes the blue in the photo. A setting like ‘cloudy’ or ‘shade’ will make the photo look more white than blue!
Bonus tip: Use a polaroid filter
If you are using a DSLR or mirrorless camera, you use a polaroid filter to enhance the skies in your photo. No matter how hard you try, the sky in a photograph is never as blue as it looks in real life when photographing snow. A polaroid filter makes the blues in the photo darker, so that the distinction between the snow and the sky becomes more clear.
By teresatrimm from Olympia, USA (55mm Tiffen Polarizing filter) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
I hope you can use some of these tips!