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.

Have you ever wondered why some lenses are white while some are black?

Well the reason for this is that lenses contain glass elements in. In high temperature glass expands. The expansion is very small and insignificant with compact lenses and so is never a problem. But very large lenses have large elements of glass, which can mean any expansion through heat can bring a lens close to the limits of its design capabilities.

But making the lens barrel white, helps to control this expansion through reflecting sunlight. This helps keep the lens cooler.

Its usually the telephoto lenses that are white. for example EF 200mm F/1.8L

Ok, So firstly you have to understand that at night, you have very low available light. In low light conditions you can compensate through increasing the ISO or the exposure time.

ISO comes from the greek word isos meaning equal. In photography we use this system to refer to how sensitive your ‘film’ is to light. A high ISO is highly sensitive to light and will absorb light much faster than a low ISO.

I am going to advise to increase the exposure time, and in fact use the lowest ISO that is available on your camera. Please avoid using ‘Auto iso’ as some cameras have this option. Please set your cameras to manual, so you can manually set everything for complete control.

Please select at the most 100 ISO but maybe even 50 ISO if you have it. Having your film less sensitive to light gives it the finest grain, giving it the best quality. Also low sensitivity means much better colour saturation, and so your colours will be much better quality than if it was set at 1600 ISO.

You will need a tripod. This is because we are going to set the speed of the shutter (the time it takes to close over the lens) to roughly 45 seconds. This is not 1 45th of a second. This means the shutter will be open to camera shake from hands, and a tripod will eliminate this. I advise to use a tripod for any exposure that is longer than 1/60th of a second. Anything faster, the speed will be fast enough to eliminate and movement made from your hands. If your camera only has a speed capabilities of 30 seconds, check to see if you have ‘Bulb” option. Most that i’ve seen do. This allows you to have complete control over speed. On this setting, once you press the shutter button, it will not close until you take your finger away. For long exposures you might want to consider a shutter release cable. This will help eliminate any shake from the pressure of your finger!

We are also going to selct a very small aperture. Preferably the smallest your camera is capable of. Maybe F22? If your camera goes further you might want to try a smaller one like F32? But remember the law of reciprocity. If you increase the Aperture number you will have to trade off with shutter time to make the exposure perfect. So you may want to make the exposure longer. In basic terms the smaller the aperture the higher the F stop setting. The higher the F stop setting, the longer your exposure time needs to be. Moving from 22 to 32 will mean adding another possible 10 seconds. I would suggest to keep taking test shots until you get the image outcome required!

Summary: ISO 100, Aperture F22 shutter speed: 45 seconds.

Please remember the amount of light in your scene will affect this. These settings will depend on what your photographing. I used these settings photographing Big Ben at midnight on a digital Hasselblad. I was quite far away, but on the public bridge, so there was some available light.

Also think about hat your photographing. Unfortunately in the picture below the clock burned out because the exposure was too much for the clock. You have to prioritse parts of the image, and expose for the bits you want. Think: Do you want to expose for the highlights or the shadows?

Big Ben, London

Millennium Wheel, London