Do your snow photographs always look dull and grey rather than having lovely white snow?

The problem is the snow itself, it is confusing your camera! The camera tries it’s hardest to get the exposure of your photo correct but, on normal Auto mode, it cannot cope with the snow. It thinks the scene is too bright and tries to correct that by letting less light into the camera, you end up with grey snow and a dull scene.

The way to correct it is simple. We need to tell the camera to let more light in, onto the sensor, to make the snow look white. If you have a compact camera the chances are it has a whole bunch of modes, or scenes, that you remember seeing once but have never used; Baby, Portrait, Landscape etc, and there will be one called Snow! That’s it, choose the Snow mode and it will make the camera let more light in and you will have much better snow pictures. If you are using a DSLR then you need to use some exposure compensation to overexpose the image by at least +1 or +2 stops, depending on the amount of snow in the scene. This may involve pressing a button, or going into the menus, and setting the exposure compensation to +1 or +2 (or somewhere in-between). If you are not sure how to make the settings on your camera you need to consult the manaul!

Also, if your are using RAW of course, or you are comfortable editing your images, you can always make the adjustment in your favorite image editing software.

That’s all there is to it. The two images in this post illustrate the point. The first one looks dull and grey while the second one has some exposure compensation aplied to it to make the snow white, as it should be.

Have fun and enjoy the snow.