How to take photos of snow scenes

In daily study, work or life, many people have written and taken photos. Taking snow scenes is a hobby of many photographers, so how to take snow scenes? Below I sorted out the skills of shooting snow scenes for your reference!

Accurate time

Don't think that the first keyword we put forward is nonsense. Do you take it for granted that the correct time to shoot is when it snows? At this time, you need to learn to think with the photographer's thinking: when will the whole snowy day be conducive to the shooting light?

When snow covers the earth, the cover will reflect light from many angles after being irradiated by the sun, so we should avoid the strong light of the sun and choose around sunrise or evening in sunny morning, when scattered light can better capture the texture and level of snow.

Practical equipment

The environment temperature for shooting snow scenes is low, so I suggest you consider bringing a professional and reliable SLR. In the choice of lens for shooting landscape works, telephoto and wide angle are the main methods. In addition, you often need to carry tripods, polarizers, hoods and other equipment.

The temperature should be below zero.

Below "zero", this is the best temperature for taking close-ups of snowflake crystals. It's time for you to get ready and look for these little things in the dead of winter in the north. We can find a lot of information about the formation of snowflake crystals from Baidu, sogou and other search engines. I won't explain the reasons in detail here. You just need to remember that shooting crystals requires a cold environment with no wind, high water vapor and a temperature below zero.

White balance of Snow Scene

Professional photographers will habitually check the white balance settings of the camera before shooting snow scenes. If your camera is still set to normal "automatic white balance" at this time, then you are miscalculated! The picture you get in this mode will be "full of blues"!

If your camera doesn't have the function of manual white balance setting, or you can't set it skillfully manually, then you can directly choose the automatic white balance mode of "snow scene/cloudy day" at this time; If you are skilled in using your own camera, you can take a custom white balance picture of pure white snow according to different camera setting modes, so as to set the most correct white balance in your environment.

Fractional photometry

There are often pictures of "snow is white" when shooting? Don't worry, there is nothing wrong with your camera. The problem is that the "automatic exposure mode" it uses doesn't work! In this Gao Fancha scene, in order to reflect the dark part and the bright part, we can measure the light separately, and then combine them to get a more accurate exposure value.

"background" contrast

When we shoot in snowy days, you will find that the foreground and background are white. At this time, in order to reflect the level of the picture, it is often necessary to add some jumping colors in the foreground or background to form a contrast.

Backlight and side backlight

When shooting, you can boldly use some backlights and side backlights to describe the scenery. Even if you shoot the distant view of the sky and the mountains on the ground, they can create a far-reaching atmosphere.

Avoid condensation

Photographic equipment is the darling of photographers. Because of the low temperature of snow shooting, when we take the camera from a cold place to a warmer place, it is easy to get wet condensation, which will temporarily disable the camera and make it impossible to shoot, so we should try our best to avoid this situation.

Give up the flash

When shooting snowflake crystal, we need to give up the method of turning on the flash to make the crystal more sensitive and textured, so as to prevent the snowflake from melting because the flash is too close to the tiny crystal.

Suitable prospect

In snow shooting, the choice of foreground is very important for photographers to create an atmosphere. Because of the particularity that snow scene is difficult to be layered, using branches hung with ice or roads, flowers and buildings covered with thick snow as the foreground of shooting can increase the depth of space, improve the expressive force of snow scene and enrich the connotation of the whole picture. You can also make a shape border like an example to make the scene more emotional and not make the viewer bored because of the snow.

The emergence of Xue Huadian

When we shoot snowflakes flying all over the sky, when the snowflakes are close to the lens and the focus area we choose is in the background area far behind the snowflakes, then you will take a photo of a Zhang Xuehua cluster.

Watch out for steam.

Have you found that when shooting with viewfinder in cold weather, the water vapor exhaled by yourself sometimes makes the camera lens hazy? So you'd better take a lens cloth with you and clean the camera at any time. Of course, you'd better wear a mask when shooting!

Skillful use of polarizer

Make the sky bluer and the white clouds whiter? That's right! It is best to take this good companion-polarizer when shooting snow scenes. The exposure compensation after adding polarizer needs to be reduced by 1/4 to 1/3 compared with that before adding polarizer.

Look at snowflakes under a microscope.

British scientist Hooke first saw the appearance of snowflake crystals under the microscope. And these snowflake crystals photographed by microscope have become rare works of art in the world. If we have a microscope with a magnification of100000 times, we can also try to shoot crystals with a camera.

Shadows create a sense of hierarchy.

Although winter feels soft but lacks details, in order to break the dullness, shadows can be used to balance the light and shade of white pictures, and shadow modeling can also add three-dimensional sense to the scene.

Facial exposure

(1) Choose a time when the light is not too strong, so that the face and background of the subject are exposed moderately in sunlight;

(2) performing peripheral exposure;

(3) Under the strong light condition, use the backlight to shoot, and use the supplementary light in the dark.

Take a small picture.

When everyone is busy shooting the vast snow scene, we might as well focus on the small scene in front of us. Lovely snowman, ice crystals on the window and chairs covered with snow are all excellent themes in winter.

HDR synthesis

When you want to shoot the colorful light and shadow of the sunset through the white forest under strong backlight, but you always can't grasp the dark details in the shadow, and the bright details near the sun in the sky can be fully reflected, HDR synthesis will be the best way to solve this problem.

We only need to make three exposures in this light: insufficient, normal and excessive, and then we only need to combine these three exposures to get a beautiful sunset snow scene with vivid details!

Shutter selection

When there are flying snowflakes in the shooting picture, the shutter speed can be set below 1/60s to condense the snowflakes into lines, while it can be set between 1/80s and1/20s to record the process of flying snowflakes. If there is a walking figure in the picture, the above shutter speed can also make the figure not blurred.