What am I doing wrong (snow)?

GlasgowTitan · 12 Mar 2006 at 11:08

I took some pictures of the snow this morning, they seemed fine on my camera, but on the pc they look really dark, is this over or under exposed or something? I have a Samsung A50 camera so its not exactly professional, but what setting should I fiddle with to get it brighter?

I had the camera up against the window, so I was shooting through the window, would that make any difference?

Cheers, I know I'm a camera n00b.

edit* Ignore the small image size, I havent bought a memory card for it yet so I can only manage 2 of the high res pics.

cyKey · 12 Mar 2006 at 11:50

If you have Photoshop open them in that and hit ctrl+shift+l for Auto levels and boom

ranarama · 12 Mar 2006 at 11:53

The trick with shooting in snow is to set the exposure compensation to +1 maybe even +2 stops. I don't know if that's possible with your camera though. The other option is to do what cyKey said and auto adjust the levels.

The reason is that all the white snow fools the camera into thinking it's a really bright scene so to get the overall brightness down to the average (is it 18% gray?) it underexposes.

hoodmeister · 12 Mar 2006 at 12:09

Conversely to what is said above, I purposely underexpose, or spot meter, snow shots - it's all too easy to blow all the snow out to one highlight.

GlasgowTitan · 12 Mar 2006 at 12:17

ranarama said:
The trick with shooting in snow is to set the exposure compensation to +1 maybe even +2 stops. I don't know if that's possible with your camera though. The other option is to do what cyKey said and auto adjust the levels.

The reason is that all the white snow fools the camera into thinking it's a really bright scene so to get the overall brightness down to the average (is it 18% gray?) it underexposes.

Thanks, I've been fiddling and I found the setting and turned it up to +2.

Result:

MouseMat2004 · 12 Mar 2006 at 14:36

Thats proper badass snow, It's just raining down here in Devon

SDK^ · 12 Mar 2006 at 15:10

ranarama said:
The reason is that all the white snow fools the camera into thinking it's a really bright scene so to get the overall brightness down to the average (is it 18% gray?) it underexposes.

Yup ^^
All digital camera meter scenes as 18% gray, therefore bright white snow becomes gray.
Hence why professionals meter from a gray card