Five Skills of Snow Portrait

Snow is falling, and winter has a soul. Every snowflake tells the story of a winter. Snow can bring endless surprises to photography, as long as you feel it with your heart.

First, preliminary preparation: model clothing color matching

When shooting a portrait of a shadow snow scene, it is necessary to think about the shooting theme, that is, the content, and the color of the model's clothing should be well matched in order to jump away from the white snow scene. Try to slim down and pay attention to the warmth of the model. You can put some warm babies on the model's clothes.

Second, shooting skills: correct exposure

Correct exposure is the most basic problem in shooting snow scenes. The part with snow in the scene is very bright, and the part without snow is very dark, which makes the contrast between the parts great.

Most digital cameras get photometric values through the reflection of the scene, so if you measure the light directly against the snow scene, the picture will be very dark. At this time, you must make exposure compensation to get normal exposure.

Simply put, exposure compensation is to increase or decrease the exposure measured by the camera. For example, the aperture takes precedence, and the exposure parameters measured by the camera are F2.8, 1/60s. If exposure compensation is added at this time, the exposure parameters will be changed to F2.8, 1/30s, and the exposure compensation will be reduced to F2.8,1125s.

Not all digital cameras can compensate for exposure. You can also adjust the aperture shutter in manual mode to achieve the same effect.

Underexposure during shooting:

1, the tolerance of CCD is narrower, and the texture and layers of overexposure will disappear.

2. At present, almost all the scanners we use are thin but not thick, and the image quality scanned by too thick negative is particularly poor.

When shooting a snow scene, the surrounding scenery can't be all white. Other objects darker than snow and light and shadow will affect our photometry. Once dark objects and light shadows are too large, we can imagine the result of exposure theory.

4. Leave room for later adjustment. As mentioned above, the fixing tolerance of current digital cameras is particularly narrow, and it will be difficult to adjust after exposure. Even if the exposure is not enough, there will be no big defects, and it will be adjusted later.

Third, manually adjust the white balance.

Although the snow scenes are all white, with the change of time and surrounding scenery, white snow will appear different colors. Therefore, when shooting snow scenes in different scenes, we should pay attention to adjusting the white balance of digital cameras at any time. In the snow, the influence of the surrounding special environment often makes the automatic white balance function of the digital camera inaccurate, and the accuracy of manual adjustment is better than that of automatic adjustment. Therefore, it is best to adjust the white balance of the digital camera through manual function at this time, so that the color of the photos taken can be restored correctly and truly.

Snow is characterized by strong reflection and high brightness. If you simply shoot a piece of white land, you will often feel dazzling and can't see anything clearly. So we'd better choose a dark background when shooting, which will make the snow and dark scenery form a strong contrast between light and shade and make the whole picture more layered. If the brightness of the selected background is also high, it will make the viewer's eyes uncomfortable.

Fourth, avoid backlighting.

When shooting snow portraits, in addition to reasonable composition, we should try to avoid shooting against the light, because people's skin is too different from the exposure value of snow, which means that if we take care of people, the snow will be pale and layered; On the other hand, if you take care of snow, people will be underexposed and the color will be dark. Therefore, when taking portraits, you should use 30-60 degrees smooth light and the back of your hand to measure light, and subtract 1 to compensate for exposure (in the automatic file), so that you can eat fish and taste bear's paw.

V. Later experience:

Shooting in the snow, if people are underexposed in order to adapt to the exposure of snow in the early stage, then the characters can be brightened in the later stage. After the exposure is balanced, adjust the corresponding tones through curves, such as red on the red channel, green on the green channel, blue on the blue channel, yellow on the blue channel, etc. , so that the work can always be completed back and forth, and finally the usual portrait decoration work can be completed.

I used a 50/ 1.4 lens, aperture 1.4, exposure time 1/3200 seconds, ISO 100, and white balance of 5600K. The film made in this way can be adjusted in curve and color balance in the later stage. It was snowing when shooting, and the model was asked to make a gesture of picking up the snow with her hands. Because I want the format of 6X6 for this film, I try to put the characters in the middle when I shoot the composition, and it will be OK when I cut it later.