photograph of flurry

<p>I am a new DSLR user of Canon XS. How can I photo some heavy flurries or snow shower?<br>

Can you suggest some settings?<br>

I have only the kit lens 18-55ES for now.<br>

Thank you</p>

<p>Actually there are a lot of ways to do this depending on what you want.</p>

<p>If you use a fast shutter speed, the flurries will be stopped in air, but will just look white or whatever, depending on the light. (Tv mode)<br>

If you use a slow shutter speed (Tv again) the flurries will show as streaks and the color will again depend on ambient lighting.</p>

<p>If you use flash, the flakes will be stopped in air, and nearby ones will show up bright as they reflect the flash if you use the flash as it is probably set up on default on your camera.<br>

There are ways of using flash here that can stop things and still show some action outside of the duration of the flash. Look up "Shutter Curtain Sync" in your manual in the Custom Functions section and look at the "2nd curtain sync" and set your camera accordingly (read in your manual how this works).</p><div></div>

<p>Since we have no way of knowing how you have your camera set, exactly how much light you have to work with, how hard it's snowing, or what time of day you'll be shooting, no meaningful setting suggestions are possible, but here's a pretty foolproof method of figuring it out:<br /> 1) Set the camera's White Balance to 'Auto' and put the camera in Tv mode (shutter priority mode...see your camera's manual)<br /> 2) Take a picture of the snow flurry.<br /> 3) Look at the image on the camera's LCD display (check the camera's manual on how to zoom in with it)<br>

If the snow appears too dark (<em>mostly</em> grayish looking instead of <em>mostly</em> white - some falling flakes will normally look dark), read the part in the camera manual about how to adjust exposure compensation. Do that incrementally, repeating 2 & 3 (above) until the snow looks right to you.<br /> <br /> When that's done, photograph the snow flurry again. What looks right to me might not suit you (are you trying to 'freeze' the falling snow, or blur it some to suggest the a falling or blowing motion?). If the falling snow is too blurry, increase the shutter speed until it looks right to you. If the snow isn't blurry enough, decrease the shutter speed until it looks right to you. This might be too small to see on the camera's LCD even if you zoom in - you might need to check this by downloading a photo or two onto your computer.<br /> <br /> To raise or lower the camera's shutter speed, you may need to adjust the lens' aperture (to raise the shutter speed, open it [use a lower f/number], and vice versa) or the ISO (to raise the shutter speed, increase it, and vice versa). Changing the shutter speed, the lens' aperture, and setting the ISO are all covered in your camera's manual.<br /> Don't forget to reset the camera's exposure compensation to '0' when you're done photographing snow, or it will mess up the exposure for other things.</p>

<p> </p>

Snowflakes are rather small. They don't show up individually very well from a distance. As a result most snow storm pictures just look gray and grainy. If someone is close to the camera wearing a dark coat then individual white dots of snow may show up against that. If you use flash, then the snow flakes a few feet in front of the camera may show up brightly to give more of an impression of a snow storm rather than of an underexpose grainy picture.

<p>Thank you all for your response. I will try these.</p>

 

<p>Onboard flash will emphasize flakes right in front of the camera. See if you can get some light off camera and sort of out in front, e.g., a porch flood or car headlights</p>

<p>My experience with snowfall photography seems to line-up, somewhat, with JDM's post above.</p>

<p>What makes it tricky, IMO, is that snowfall does not look natural to me, at all, when its motion is stopped by a camera.</p>

<p>Another factor is the low contrast (and often low light levels) present in so many scenes in which a heavy flurry (or blizzard) occurs.</p>

<p>In my experience, shutter speed is the most important thing to get right before I get the look that I am after. Next, is finding a point of view that gives a contrasty background to the falling flakes. Exposure compensation is also often necessary to capture the snow whiteness-level that you desire.</p>

<p>I find that heavier flurries turn-out better for me than lighter flurries - and the windspeed changes things quite a bit.</p>

<p>The size of the flakes plays a big roll too. In my area the size ranges from cookie to sand grain. Larger flakes make for a better scene, however, many of those images are ruined by flakes that pass close to the lens or close to a prominent, near distant subject, because, that can cause a translucent, white smudge or "bloom" (almost like a mini-lens flare).</p>

<p>I've never had much luck with flash - on camera or off - for scenic snowfall shots. I think the problems with flash include: size of light source too small, rapid light fall-off causing uneven lighting (a flash just can't light enough of the scene evenly) and directional light causing uneven back-scatter/reflection from individual flakes. Similar sort of problem with flash occurs underwater in the presence of heavy plankton or bottom sediment in the water column. I can only guess that some of these problems could be overcome if one used enough off-camera lights (we may see that on youtube some day ;~)).</p>

<p>So, I found I had to experiment a lot and shoot a lot of frames. Another reason to be thank-full for digital image capture!</p>

<p>Cheers! Jay</p><div></div>

<p>Here is another example with very light flurry.</p>

<p>Cheers! Jay</p><div></div>

<p>Earlier in this thread, it was correctly pointed out that small-to-normal sized flakes in a landscape shot often make the image look gritty instead of the viewer being able to resolve each flake.</p>

<p>I want to add that this problem is especially bad with small (in pixel dimensions) photos. Web photos and anything under 2 or 3k pixels in the long dimension are especially vulnerable to this. Larger images (say, > 4 - 6K pixels on an edge) which are truly sharp work much better. It is especially frustrating to have such an image, and then not be able to show it on the web because once downsized, the individual flakes just disappear.</p>

<p>Tom M.</p>