Pictures of Snow perfectly exposed ?

<p>Why am I getting perfectly exposed pictures of snow with my digital camera ? I thought the old adage was to increase exposure by 2 stops, or 1 1/2 stops so the snow wont come out looking 18% grey. However, I'm doing none of that and my pictures come out looking great without going to PP. Do todays cameras with their fancy algorithms take this into account ? I have not tried this shooting RAW yet.</p>

<p>Harry, to my knowledge some less expensive and intricate cameras, like my little point and shoot digital, give 12 or 18% grey with snow. My system camera probably better evaluates the full or overall range of reflected light from all objects in the snow scene and would give a setting that leaves snow close to white. I will try it tomorrow morning.</p>

<p>If you photograph only snow in bright light (with no other subject matter in the frame), do you still get white or does your camera provide light grey? If white, perhaps Saint Nicholas has his camera gifts exposure calibrated at the north Pole?</p>

<p>Since the old (pre matrix metering) manuals mentioned snow as a reason to do exposure compensation I guess you are right about them algorithms. - Have you checked EXIFs against your handheld meter? Or turned matrix metering of for a few frames?<br>

I hope the snow will melt, otherwise I'll take my just outdated camera out and look what I'll get.</p>

<p>Here is a picture I took today, with no PP other than removing the blueish cast that snow usually creates. I just hit the Auto Color correct in PSE and that was it... </p><div></div>

<p>Ah, I figured you were referring to straight out of the camera shots, but no matter.</p>

<p>Here there are enough other varied subjects than snow to allow an evaluative or even just an averaging metering system to provide both light and dark tones, rather than seeing only the snow and thereby producing a grey tone.</p>

<p>It's about wider dynamic range than film had....and you can extend this further in pp. My couple of pennies.</p>

<p>Les</p>

<p>Its the AA (Ansel Adams) filter. Actually probably some scene recognition mode recognizes snow or sand and adjust accordingly. Try a black cat and see what happens.</p>

<p>As Arthur Plumpton notes, I think in the picture shown the highlighted snow came out well in part because there is so much shadow and darker buildings that the camera's meter is overexposing the highlights about right already. This is the kind of scene a matrix meter ought to handle without much fuss.</p>

<p>My Nikon DSLR still requires some compensation for open snow, but it's true that it's easier than it used to be, and my little Fuji point and shoot has both "snow" and "beach" settings that guess surprisingly well. </p>

<p>The photo that you posted does have a fair amount of snow in it, but most of it is in shadow. The snow in this scene is actually darker than the sky, and in fact most of the snow is roughly a middle gray. Your camera saw a scene dominated by a blue sky and shadowed snow (both middle tones), with smaller areas of dark buildings and bright snow in sunlight, and gave an exposure that put the shadowed snow roughly equivalent to 18 percent gray. Had you metered off the shadowed snow and overexposed to make it white, the sky would also be completely white.<br>

<br />Overexposing to make snow white is good advice if you are metering off the snow that you want to make white. If you meter off something that you want rendered as a middle tone (a gray card, a blue sky, snow in shadow, etc.), you'll get something like the picture you posted.</p>

<p>I don't know what brand/model of camera you shot the scene with, if you metered matrix or area-weighted, or what degree of auto scene selection the algorithm imposed. Recognizing, and compensating for a snow scene is probably doable in your camera's Program Mode, without your intervention. </p>

<p>My D3 is prone to blowing highlights. Snow is not a problem unless the camera latches on to a darker area for metering. My Sony A7, on the other hand, seems almost immune to blown highlights, even into the sun. Either cameras are getting smarter or snow darker, probably due to Global Warming (capitalized for full, escatalogical effect).</p>

<p>Harry is shooting with a Pentax K5 IIs and Takumar lens posted on this PN thread... http://www.photo.net/pentax-camera-forum/00dh4o</p>

<p>I've noticed my 2006 Pentax K100D tends to under expose matrix metered shots like this. If I point it at clusters of trees in my local park back lit by blue sky but side lit by the sun it will blow out the blue sky peaking through the branches of the trees.</p>

<p>On K5's though with expanded dynamic range than my K100D this doesn't happen as severely going by online comparison images.</p>

<p>But also to note that my K100D's contrast setting is over cranked even when reducing incamera contrast slider to max. We don't know what Harry's contrast setting is set to.</p>

<p>Good explanation Mark Zell.</p>

For reminder how modern smart cameras handle extremes of light and dark, this Thorpe video is rather interesting refresher.

 

 

Same story we all knew. Meters, both incident and reflective, are not so smart. Computer programs in cameras are. And getting smarter all the time with a little nudge of the compensation button or dial. I personally trust the ESP modes a lot more latel, and why not. As long as we recognize when not to trust them too much. Or crank in a standard deviation.

No snow. Sand yes.. That said, Your photo does have a range of tone as the gent said.

<p>Perhaps a possible hick in all this is that there are two photographers, one holding the camera and the other grafted within its software. I love automation in practical cases, like my ABS brakes or anti-sliding feature on Canadian snow covered roads or black iced highways. I would not refuse its availability in the tools for photography, but after I took my first tree branch reflections on bright snow and got a muddy image I was incited to think why and to seek to better control the camera. I was forced to learn why and how to modify the parameters for different results. There was no "second photographer" within the limited automation of my then camera. So, are we often not better off having more personal control of the image? Overriding the highly automated camera is of course an option in many cases, but it is sort of like painting white over a recently painted red kitchen ceiling when your wife changes her mind about the renovation.</p>

<p>This is not a rant, but I am currently having a frustrating time getting to identify, know, and accept the great multitude of automated features of a new Sony mirrorless camera. But that is probably par for the course for someone who had still been adjusting focus, DOF, shutter speed and aperture on less automated beasts.</p>

<p>I think one of the reasons for the increasing popularity of mirrorless cameras is that you can see a good representation of the results before you take the photo and just spin the compensation dial or use exposure lock to get what you want.</p>

<p>Except from small spots in the image the sunlit snow is far from white. Most of it has values up to about 200 (of 255) and some small areas approach white (~240). The snow in the attached image may be considered white (and still not burnt out)<br /> Cheers,</p><div></div>

<p>Perhaps, and in reference to Frode Langset's example, the key to effective whiteness is whether or not the white subject retains texture. Although it is difficult to tell from the screen, some of the snow appears to retain that texture and other parts not.</p>

<p>Hmmm...I think texture is more about contrast (hard vs soft light) than whiteness. Contrast will be extremely low when the light is extremely diffuse (overcast and foggy) as in my example image. You can in fact see details all over the place if you adjust contrast to its extreme, but that would not reflect my liking (and also no what I saw when I captured the image). In OP's image the contrast is high since the light is very hard.<br>

I must also clarify that I did not mean that OP's image should have been adjusted to show the sun lit snow as white as the snow in my example image. I do however believe that OP's image is not the typical snow image where a light meter will fail, both because there are large areas that is quite dark and because one (or at least OP) would not want the sun lit snow to be very white in the final image. I would like to see a light meter that would expose my example image correct by itself. My didn't (Pentax K-3). By correct I mean that a JPG straight out of the camera would be correctly exposed (usually - also in this image - I will expose such scenes darker on purpose to avoid burnt out areas and I use RAW)</p>

<p>Hope this added some useful meaning to my previous post.</p>

<p>Cheers,</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Perhaps, and in reference to Frode Langset's example, the key to effective whiteness is whether or not the white subject retains texture. Although it is difficult to tell from the screen, some of the snow appears to retain that texture and other parts not.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I've found capturing texture in snow scenes with my Pentax K100D DSLR in Raw format is an ordeal in itself. See below the before and after.</p>

<p>Even though it doesn't appear to have much work done to it, I've been reworking it several times throughout the years as well as others shot during that rare day we had snow back in February 2011 here in Texas. Brightening the overall image while maintaining snow texture has taken many hours.</p>

<p>I'ld like to see someone post a similar snow scene straight out of the camera that shows definition in snow texture without making the overall scene look dark. I mean it's a bright sunny day. Make the image look like it.</p><div></div>