Snow fascinates photographers. Winter is my favorite season, and honestly I prefer winter to even the colorful beauty of autumn’s fall foliage. And my favorite of all are the sunrise & sunset pictures in winter, especially after some heavy overnight snowfall. However, when I first started shooting very frequently in winter, it was not at all easy. I made several mistakes and it took me a while to get almost everything right to be able to make pictures that actually sells.
Camera Setting Tips for Fantastic Winter & Snow Photography
Most cameras these days are extremely powerful and can automatically adjust to snow conditions when it comes to exposures and color temperatures. However, if you are using a moderate to high end digital SLR camera, its best to shoot in RAW format & follow a more conservative and tested settings for winter & snow conditions.
- Snow Photography Tip 1: Use Manual setting. Compensate exposure anything from +1 to +2 EV. But don’t worry if you are not doing this so accurately. Your camera most probably accommodates 5 – 6EV of exposure latitudes and you can adjust this in your image processing software.
At the same time, check for the color temperature setting also. “Auto” setting often adds a cast that could be hard to remove especially if you are like me who do not prefer to manipulate images. This Nikon article suggests how to adjust the color temperature for a more realistic taste.
- Snow Photography Tip 2: Shoot when the snow is fresh. There is a huge difference is photographing snow and photographing ice. Ice could be flat and quite boring, while I find snow to have a fantastic texture, and very sensitive to the incident light. Snow is less reflective and if you are shooting with the sun low on the horizon, you are likely to get a beautiful warmth or glow from the snow.
From years of selling pictures I found out that buyers prefer snow that is untouched and pristine, just like you would get early morning after a night of heavy snowfall.
- Snow Photography Tip 3: Try composing panoramas of snowy landscapes. Since I always shoot before sunrise & at sunset, I almost always get the best of snow & ice. To make the best of the textures & the contours created by both snow and ice, I do a lot of panorama compositions that include a wide angle of landscape.
I do not crop a regular picture to make a panorama. I either use Nikon’s PC lenses or otherwise take multiple images & then stitch them in Lightroom to create panoramas. But this should not make a difference if you plan to use your winter snow pictures on your website only. However, if you plan to make large photo prints or sell digital copies, you would need to create sufficiently large files with high resolution & hence cropping a regular frame to make a panorama is not an option.
- Snow Photography Tip 4: Use Neutral Density filters creatively. This is tricky but could be the one tip that cane really make a difference between an amateurish photo & a professional one. I have often used a combination of gradual ND filters to get the right exposure of subjects that is in shade in a snow covered landscape.
In the Pemaquid Lighthouse panorama above I had used 2 gradual ND filters stacked opposite to each other to get the right exposure on the lighthouse building in the center of the image. With the sun in the frame and snow on the ground, the exposure was complicated and the only way I got to expose properly for the buildings was to cut out light from the sky & the ground by using 2 inverted stacked gradual ND filters.
Snow Photography Tip 5: Shoot low, very low. Personally I find this approach to be extremely helpful & differentiates a professionally captured picture from an amateurish snapshot. The low angle captures 2 aspects of great snow photography.
First, it captures the snow textures beautifully in the foreground. Secondly, if you are photographing the winter scenes early morning or late afternoon when the sun is low on the horizon, a low angle composition captures the play of light on the snowy surface very effectively. The orangish to yellowish tone of the early morning or the pinkish to bluish tone of late afternoon comes out very well from the snow covered winter landscape only when you are as close to the ground as possible.
Additional professional tips for winter snow photography
- Dress for the snow. I prefer to use the gloves that come with dotted non-slippery surfaces instead of those gloves where the fingers are exposed. Since I always use a remote and a tripod, the completely covered hand gloves are not a problem for me. Also mind your shoes. I use the North Face snow shoes especially when I go out to new places after a heavy snow & I carry an extra pair of socks so what I can dry my feet in the car immediately after I return from my shoot
- Carry extra batteries. Batteries ear out fast in low temperatures. Batteries wear out even faster when you use live-views for composition. You can almost assume that your batteries would work in 50% efficiency when shooting in winter snow conditions, so carrying a few extra fully charged batteries is a great idea
- Use colored gel on flash. I have successfully added some great foreground colors by shooting low and using a flash with pinkish or orangish gels on the flash. It just adds a dash of colors to the foreground to accentuate the mood of sunrise or sunset
- I do not use polarizing filters on very wide angle lenses. Polarizing filters on wide angle lenses are a bad idea because it polarizes the sky non-uniformly and such a cast could be almost impossible to remove in Lightroom
- Use extreme caution when changing memory cards. This is a real tip and believe me, although it sounds silly, you do not want to drop your SD card that has all your 200+ pictures in the wet watery snow while trying to change the card with your gloves on. There is no short cut – open your gloves and them change your memory cards. I have made this mistake a few times in the beginning in an attempt to save time and sometimes out of sheer forgetfulness and sadly I lost images in that process. While some of the costly professional memory cards can still functional after dropping in the snow, you can never be sure & I suggest that you do not risk this at all
The best part of photographing snow & winter scenes is the lack of people and tourists outside. Although there have been situations where I drove for several hours, starting early morning when it was still snowing, hoping to find the place all to myself, only to find bunches of tourists who flogged the scene because it was there first time seeing snow! Nonetheless, the fun & creative opportunities for snow photography is almost endless & worth your time and effort.