WINTER EXPOSURES

Are you ready? It’s the time of year for shooting winter scenes, determining whether landscape conditions are naughty or nice, making an outdoor gear list and checking it twice and finding and developing those iconic winter wonderlands so you can walk away with memorable photographs. All year we’ve known—winter is coming. But are you ready, now that it’s here? If you’re ready or not, my hope with this article is that you walk away with a deeper understanding of how to approach your winter scenes confidently so you can expose and develop them with a sense of mastery.

The Challenges Of Winter Exposures

If you’ve never done it before, shooting snowy landscapes offers its own set of challenges. Contrast can be extreme, and highlights can be off the charts. Moreover, if you’re coming from a film background, how one approaches that “good exposure” is very different. For starters, the film photographer’s main tool for exposure is the light meter, and light meters today are quite sophisticated. However, a good exposure on a nice piece of colorful slide film is very different from capturing light data with a digital exposure.

With film, we need to visualize our outcome and get it right the first time, in-camera. If we over- or underexpose a full