Sun and Snow!
Ok budding photographers, as we get more confident with our skills we need to be able to recognise potential problems when out and about and how to deal with them! My next article is about lighting situations. It is very rare in scenic photography to have to pay special attention to shadowed areas. Most often the visual aesthetics is carried through the highlights in the scene, and exposure can be biased in the level of detail seen in these. The most significant thing to remember is to avoid your exposure readings being affected by these excessively. An obvious example is the sun. But also the reflection from snow!
The Sun might be in the scene, or it may be reflected into the image through a highly reflective surface like water! When shooting into the sun, the myriad of tiny reflections is like metering sun itself.
The technique to combat this, is to point your meter in an area that is more representative of a mid-tone, like grey. Metering for 18%, or otherwise modify the setting.
Look at a plus one or possibly in extreme sun settings a plus two stops extra. This will give an exposure that will still capture the sparkle of the scene, but avoid the moonlight effect that against the light shots over water can easily become.
Below though, i deliberately didn’t change the exposure. I actually wanted to capture the effect of the wrong exposure, and don’t be afraid if you want to as well. I like (you may not) the sun spot effect and the silhouetting of the foreground.
Snow scenes can easily cause you problems too! If you keep in mind that the meter is expecting to read an 18% tone i.e. mid grey, you will realise that when most of your scene is in fact all white, the meter will change it to a muddy grey. Never aesthetically pleasing when photographing fresh white fallen snow, you must change the exposure to trick it. To get it sparkling white, you must make a close up or spot reading of a darker area. I have mentioned in a previous article about exposing for shadows or highlights. This is a good example of a situation. You need to make a judgement of how much snow is in the scene, and depending on this, you cn decide whether to increase your exposure by 1 stop or two.