The Pixel Diarist: Shooting in Winter

Pine Brook Trail, Harriman Park, NY 11/30/11, Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20nn at 10mm, ISO200, 1/1250, F10

Boy, do I Love taking pictures in Winter!

Winter blues? Not me. Head south for warmer climes? No way! I live for Winter. But getting good pictures at this time of the year can be a bit of a challenge, unless you understand and approach it sensibly and prepare accordingly.

I will divide this post into three topics – personal prep, gear prep and actual shooting.

Being out in the cold for many hours taking pictures is quite different from just conducting your normal activities. As that mercury dips (as the cliché goes, but I think mercury thermometers for consumer use are all but gone) it becomes harder and harder to stay warm. Add to that a little precipitation and/or wind, and you have your first challenge - avoiding frostbite and hypothermia.

When preparing for a day out in the cold, the usual cautions apply. Minimize exposed flesh, dress in layers, avoid wearing cotton, use a polypropylene wicking layer next to the skin, use a windproof outer layer, and to help avoid cold hands and feet – wear a hat and neck gaiter or scarf. If it is really cold and you anticipate lots of time just standing around, then chemical hand and toe warmers will be your best friend. Your goal is to stay dry and warm, and if you plan on hiking where you will generate perspiration, that poly layer will help minimize that clammy feeling.

If you are going hiking into areas with fresh snow cover, you might want to consider a pair of snowshoes and ski poles. Otherwise, a set of MicroSpikes from Kahtoola http://www.kahtoola.com/microspikes.php are the order of the day. These traction devices are made of that really tough gummy elastomer and hardened steel, and are like four wheel drive on the trails. They are easy to slip on and off your shoes and are small enough to slip into your pocket.

Stores that cater to outdoor winter activities will probably be your best bet for finding the right gear and advice for your planned activities.

Bring a thermal bottle filled with a hot drink. When I go out on hiking trails, I usually bring a bottle full of tasty soup - it really does warm you up, and provides a bit of extra energy.

Camera gear. Generally your gear does not need any special preparation, other than the usual precautions to keep the gear dry while shooting. A weather cover, or in a pinch, a plastic garbage bag can help keep the snow off your gear. Cold does make batteries much less efficient, so it makes sense to bring an extra battery or two for each device.

One of the things that you should look out for is condensation. Bringing in a camera from the cold into a warm and moist environment is always a peril to be avoided. I will remove my memory cards in the car, then leave my camera and lenses zipped up in the bag so that it warms gradually, resulting in little to no condensation forming on glass or in the moisture-sensitive electronics. In fact, it’s a good practice to keep your camera cold. Avoid putting a camera under your jacket – it will just become wet with condensation when you remove it. Also, avoid breathing on the viewfinder or LCD – it will become glazed over with a layer of ice, rendering it useless.

Taking the picture. This can be very challenging, since the low angle of the sun will give you extremely bright areas and deep shadows. The wide brightness range is often beyond the capability of a modern digital camera to capture in a single exposure. This will force you to decide what is more important to you – the highlights or the shadows, and make the necessary compensation. Another complication are the broad areas of white or near white, which will totally confuse even the most sophisticated metering systems, resulting in somewhat underexposed images. With large expanses of deep blue sky, everything taken in open skylight will take on a cold, steely blue hue, so white balance needs to be monitored or custom adjusted if your camera has that capability.

This is my strategy when shooting snowy scenes. I shoot raw (see my 1/17/12 post). If your camera can shoot uncompressed raw, use it. I set my ISO to its lowest setting, providing me the widest dynamic range. I use exposure compensation to +.7 or +1. This will take the camera’s reading and add a bit of extra light, bringing the areas of snow out of a dingy grey tone and more towards white. I typically do not set a custom white balance, preferring to make that adjustment in post-processing. My camera has a blinking “Highlight Warning” mode in its display settings which I always keep set to on, so I can quickly see much overexposure, if any, my images will have.

I rely heavily on the camera's histogram tool during critical shots. It will instantly reveal loss of information in the shadows and the highlights, and can help you make appropriate adjustments.

here is an example of an underexposed image in Photoshop, with its histogram

See how the tonal values in the histogram are all bunched up to the left, and there is a significant amount of data is actually touching the left border, indicating a loss of detail in the shadows. Any time the histogram values touch a border - clipping - you begin to lose information. If it touches on the left you have pure black, and on the right you have pure white. Notice there is very little tonal information on the right, and the image has no pure white. In many (but not all) photographs the goal is to have some black and some white, and lots of middle tones.

This image is overexposed. Histogram shows significant detail loss on the right (highlight) side of the graph.

And finally this image shows better balance. The histogram barely touches left and right indicating no loss of detail due to clipping in either the highlights or the shadows.

And here is the final image, with some manipulation of the blue level, shadow recovery and sharpening adjustments applied.

Croton Reservoir Dam Spillway, 1/29/11, Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm, ISO 200, 1/320 F11

Most cameras can tolerate a bit of underexposure and shadow recovery, but overexposed highlight recovery is typically only minimally possible at best. When in doubt, use exposure bracketing, or better yet, take those multiple exposures and combine them as an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image (this technique will be explained in detail in a future post). I included this HDR shot for comparison. I took a series of 5 exposures, bracketed to -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, then combined these in Photomatix Pro, a popular HDR processing software tool.