jmleask@wateng.UUCP (Jim Leask) (09/26/84)
How do you expose for snow shots??!??
A lot of my shots from last year (I like to "play"
in the snow) seemed to be underexposed. I usually opened
up the aperture by about 1 to 1 1/2 stops to compensate
(I thought) for the amount of white in the picture. However,
I often was disappointed by the results since the snow had
a dirty brown colour, and my main subject (a skier or the like)
was dark.
QUESTIONS:
1) how much should you compensate for snow shots in
bright sunlight, slightly overcast, blizzards .....?
2) will any filters help improve the colour and exposure?
3) does film speed make much difference? (I often use 400ASA
even in bright light since I use a zoom lens a lot and seem
to have shaky hands)
4) how often does a photo lab mess around with prints, assuming that
they have to compensate for snow shots when they really should
just print normally
5) if a shot is OVERexposed, do you get a colour shift in the
film which could cause colour problems like this?
(the lab said they were overexposed, but from my limited
knowledge of colour developing that doesn't make sense)
------------------
Jim Leask
{alegra, utzoo, ...}!watmath!wateng!jmleaskdave@rocksvax.UUCP (09/30/84)
I don't think you can get good snow and people shots, the best I ever
try for is to get the people or the background correctly exposed. The
film just doesn't have enough dynamic range as they would say in the
audio world. I found that Kodak seems to process snow shots very well,
they usually end up white. The Fogomats and the like seem to give you
brown snow... I think their auto-color corrector are not programmed to
understand snow, it might have been designed in California.
If your area has a rental color darkroom you might try playing with rolling
your own print. You may not get brown snow, but you might be able to get it
correct or even make magenta snow.
I also wonder if any other areas have rental darkrooms, the one in
Buffalo and Rochester charges $5/hour + 0.25 an 8x10 chemistry fee.
Seemed pretty reasonable to me, but sometimes you wonder!! They have
processing machine that you feed the paper into and it drops out the
other end 11 minutes later, so that you can pipeline some prints
processing with some darkroom time to keep the $5/hour fee reasonable
for a bunch of prints.
Hope this helps a bit...
Dave
arpa: Sewhuk.HENR@Xerox.ARPA
uucp: {allegra,rochester,amd,sunybcs}!rocksvax!davegbr@mb2c.UUCP (Jerry Ruhno) (10/04/84)
Although I am no expert on taking snow pictures one rule-of-thumb I read about said the set the film speed setting on your camera to 1/2 of what your actual film speed is. Then just shot according to what your light reading says. For example, if your ASA is 100 set your camera at 50.
daver@hp-pcd.UUCP (daver) (10/18/84)
One option would be to ignore the snow and other background light by using an incident light reading, if you have a light meter capable of giving you one, or by taking an exposure reading off a neutral gray card (you can buy calibrated neutral gray cards) or off your skin and adjusting the exposure as needed (caucasian skin is typically about one stop brighter than neutral gray - you might want to calibrate your skin). In most open outdoor situations these techniques will give a reasonable exposure setting, though the excessive backlight may cause other problems depending on the film and lens you use. Good luck. Dave Rabinowitz hplabs!hp-pcd!daver