Feb 22

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Wednesday, February 22, 2012 

This week's challenge was photographing the snow sculptures at Winnipeg's annual Festival du Voyageur.  Taking photos of snow can be a bit of a challenge as all cameras meter snow at 18% grey.  In order to get the true white of the snow on camera, you end up needing to over-expose your image by anywhere from 1/2 to 1.5 stops.  This will create a different challenge, however as overexposing for the snow tends to blow out the sky.  So how to expose properly for the snow and yet keep the blue sky?  The solution:  HDR (High Dynamic Range)  This is where you take multiple shots of the same scene at varying exposures (usually 3-5 images with 1 stop in between each) and combine all shots in post processing to acheive the photograph that matches the closest to what your eyes actually saw.

This first image is not an HDR and as you can see the sky is blue but very light and the snow is very grey.

This next image is an HDR from a different angle of the same snow sculpture and here you can see the gorgeous blue sky and white of the snow balanced.  This shot was a 5-image HDR shot at -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2 exposure values and combined in Photomatix.

HDR has many applications and while I have used it for other things in the past to bring out the grain in a wooden building, add drama and texture to skies in landscapes, etc. I hadn't tried the technique with snow before.  I think it was a success and will try using it again in the future.