Search the Web

Sunday, October 12, 2008

WINTER PHOTOGRAPHY

Winter can offer some really great pictures but it is very difficult shooting them and could be very challenging.With our tips we want to help you through the process.
1.Dress warmly-The mos important thing is to keep your self warm because you could stay many ours in very low temperatures freezing your self to death.You have to be very careful especially for the head because it is the primary source of heat loss so I advice you to use wool pull-down hat that covers your ears.And you can use chemical hand warmers,they are very practical.
2.Protect your camera-If you want to shoot during snow fall you have to protect your camera because the snow on it can freeze it and block it so you may use a commercial rain cover.Another important thing is not to warm your camera as it can create condensation and damage it.
3.Careful with batteries-I advice you to take some extra batteries with you and keep them in a warm place,lets say in your coat pocket,as the cold can zap out energy from your batteries.
4.Watch your breath-don't release it in front of the view finder as you can create vapor which instantly becomes a film of ice and becomes unusuable for a long period of time.And also careful and do not warm your lenses as it can be
very problematic and even loose all day without shooting.
5.Tripod-Always carry your tripod but careful with it as it can also be damaged by cold temperatures and snow.Maybe you would want to keep is legs all together,push them slowly to the snow and then spread them so you can protect them from damages.
6.Exposure-Is the most important thing you have to learn to shoot in cold winter.Because you often have big surface with snow which is very white your camera meter sees it as overexposed and tends to make it a medium gray tone which we don't want.The way to avoid this is to overexpose the meter reading(but be sure to meter just snow ) depending upon the lighting conditions,let say ,+1.5 to +2 for sunny midday condition or if lighting is more subdued:Early morning or late day,or heavy overcast you have to go to +1/2 to +1.If you are using an automatic point and shoot camera and you have an exposure lock button,you can compensate by filling the frame of the view finder with a Darker area and depress the exposure lock button.The camera meter will overexpose the scene upon the dark area that you metered.You can shoot a photo with this procedure and another exposed automatically and choose whose the best.Careful so that the metered scene is not to dark.If your camera has a spot meter function sometimes shown as a rectangle with a center dot use it to pre-focus on a non-white object and then shoot.This will help you a lot.
7.Remember you have to shoot in Raw so you can change some things after and make your photos better.

No comments: