Photographing in the snow

Hi, is there anybody with experience to photograph in snowy conditions?

What do I have to look out for?

What kind of settings should I use?

I have a Lumix FZ30

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no experience at all here but found this googling :

photography and snow

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Sounds of Nkorho Support africam

Ask your friend Snowy Owl,lol.Have a great,and safe time.

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Keep your camera under a woolen scarf, for one, because if it freezes you get condensation on the lens LOL

What I usually do is try to find some middle value object--nothing too dark, nothing too light, focus on that and save those settings (f stop) and use that to shoot the snow landscape. that usually keeps the image from looking like Morning at Nkorho Smiling

If a camera accepts it, a polarizing filter is useful

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Britney Smurf, aka Lady Hawke, aka Smalf A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

**Active Discussions**

The link Gerda posted is excellent as it tells you everything you need to set your camera manually for exposure and white balance.

In addition, the FZ30 has a number of preset shooting modes you can select, one of them is "snow" Smiling Should be worth a try ! Smiling If that does it correctly, it's fully automatic. I'll be interested to know what your results are from that.

Can't help you, Ceri!

But I can wish you many sunny days like we have them at the moment! I'm so glad for you that you have good weather! I look at the Zinal webcam every day to look how the conditions are.

Have much fun with the kids and enjoy!

And give my greetings to the Weisshorn and the Zinal Glacier! I was up there several times wigh my kids!

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Nkosi sikelel' iAfrica (National Hymn of SA)

God bless Africa!

Brian wrote:

The link Gerda posted is excellent as it tells you everything you need to set your camera manually for exposure and white balance.

Yesterday I was taking a few shots with the "snow" mode. I had a look at the site Gerda gave, but I don't understand what they mean with this part

One really nice thing about snow, is that it makes it incredibly easy to set your white balance. Whichever camera you have, take it OFF of auto white balance and set it to “Preset”, then hold down the WB button until the PRE flashes on the LCD. At this point, take a photo of the white snow and look on your top LCD and make sure it’s flashing -GOOD-. This will set the white balance to the color of the snow, which should be white.

What is the WB button and PRE? Is it something on Nikon only?

Hi Cerinthe,

I've had a look at the manual for the FZ30 now and the snow mode is claimed to set exposure comensation and white balance correctly for effective snow scenes. But probably only in ideal conditions.

If it is overcast, then you might need more exposure compensation, but you only have 2 stops and that's what you need for a bright scene. Better in those conditions to expose on something partly shaded and use exposure lock.

White balance can be set manually, but it's not the same buttons on your camera Smiling Page 83 of the FZ30 manual I have here explains how to do it manually on yours. Set it to White set 1, then press > aim it at the snow and press > again. Then take the picture. There is also a provision for adjusting it slightly, if needed.

The best way is to set your camera to take the picture in RAW instead of JPG, which your camera can do, in the picture quality settings. You can then use photoshop to open the RAW image on your PC and set whatever white balance you want, before converting it to a JPG (and replacing the JPG the camera also saves) Just adjust the white balance slider control in the adobe RAW editing screen until it looks right ! You can also further adjust the exposure by about 1 stop more when doing this.

Tip : if you do start using RAW, set the saturation to about +15 whilst adjusting white balance and exposure and contrast to about +10, then open for final editing (that step is obvious at that stage) and use unsharp mask set to 150,2,0. You'll get punchy sharp well exposed pics the right colour Smiling

You might, of course, never want to use anything but RAW again, which reduces the number of pics on a CF card and increases the time spent in post processing, but that's life Smiling

The master has spoken!

Thanks Brian to go to all the trouble of looking it up for me. I have never used RAW, but might try it later on when I had a good look at my camera to see where it is Smiling

I will certainly try all your suggestions. I have this camera already some time and have never tried much, only went snapping on auto.

You have given me advice before and I tried it out and it worked, so be sure I will try this too.

I can just set the cam on RAW and change it later to JPG if I want? Can I switch between the settings from pic to pic?

cerinthe wrote:

I can just set the cam on RAW and change it later to JPG if I want? Can I switch between the settings from pic to pic?

Yes and yes Smiling

Careful using RAW, it's addictive and a lot more versatile than JPG Smiling You'll use a lot more memory card and disk space, but you'll never go back Smiling lol

Just think of those sunsets now and setting just exactly the right white balance back on your PC to give the vivid colours you saw with your own eyes ! heh heh Smiling

I finally found "raw" on my camera (and Olympus) and could only get one image because my card wasn't large enough. Also noticed it took longer transfer time to record the image.

That was only a 16mb card.

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Britney Smurf, aka Lady Hawke, aka Smalf A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

**Active Discussions**

Olympus tend to use much less compression, so their RAW files are usually bigger than others and the TIFF file option only Olympus has used is a lot bigger Smiling

I'm not surprised you could only get one picture on a 16MB card Smiling

The larger file sizes will inevitably take longer to write to the card.

I use 4GB cards and shoot in RAW plus small JPG and get about 390 shots on a card. I use the JPG for reviewing and sorting, then finalise WB, exposure, etc in Photoshop using the RAW images. I keep the RAW images so that I can produce large uncompressed high quality images for printing and publication.

Brian,

thanks for all this great info.

I'm learning a lot Smiling

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Sounds of Nkorho Support africam

Thanks, Brian. That's interesting. Once you've modified an image, can it be saved as a copy in "raw?"

I only recently understood that "jpeg" involved compression. And I had always thought that in order to print, the digital image had to be in "jpeg" format.

I don't have Photoshop (way to expensive for an amateur like me). I use Paintshop Pro.

Not that I do a lot of manipulating the photo's after the fact.

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Britney Smurf, aka Lady Hawke, aka Smalf A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

**Active Discussions**

If you view a RAW file, it will display using the parameters that would have been used to produce the JPG. If you change any of those, like white balance, exposure, saturation, etc., the new values are saved along with the file and are used next time you view it, but the file itself is not changed and is still the original RAW file.

Some lossless compression is used to generate a RAW file, how much depends on the camera manufacturer.

A JPG generated by the camera, on the other hand is produced from the RAW image in camera, even on cameras that do not allow a RAW setting. The JPG is produced using the parameters set on the camera at the time, including white balance., etc. These cannot, therefore, be changed afterwards. JPG uses a lossy compression method, enabling much smaller files to be produced, resutling in faster write times to the memory card, fast transfer to your PC and faster download times from a web site. Due to the lossy method, they can lose fine detail, however. In camera processing usually uses a lot of sharpening, often a bit too much, but it does produce punchy sharp pictures that most casual users will be happy with, so it's a pretty good system.

You only need RAW when you are going for that bit extra, as per the questions being asked here, then you have more control, being able to fit the white balance, final exposure, saturation, contrast, sharpening, etc. to the individual picture, instead of having them all done to the same exact method the camera has decided on Smiling

For printing, almost any program can print a JPG, as it is the base level. Photoshop and many other programs can print direct from a RAW image or any other format you might want.

For printing calendars, posters, pictures for framing, etc. you want the highest possible definition. For this the publisher/printer will prefer a TIFF file, a format developed specifically for the printing and graphics industry. For this you need to start with a RAW image, as converting a lossy JPG will produce much poorer results. Don't get that statement wrong, you can produce a good image and a good conversion from a good JPG, but if you have a RAW file to start from, it's going to be a fair bit better.

From the RAW file, I adjust as needed to suit the picture, then open for final editing, adjusting shadow areas if needed and use unsharp mask to apply the minimum needed to bring the picture out. I then save it as a TIFF file, which is uncompressed, so no detail can be lost from that point on. TIFF files are big though, the ones from my camera come out at about 35MB each, so they are only used for publishing houses.

All my web pics are reduced to one megapixel resolution, since that's all you can see on a PC screen anyway and they're all saved as JPG for small download size and speed.

Hope that helps rather than adding confusion Smiling

Hope that helps rather than adding confusion

It certainly does help! You've given me an A Ha! moment LOL

Thanks so much. Would you mind sharing a link to your website?

PS: Ceri, my apologies for hijacking your thread.

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Britney Smurf, aka Lady Hawke, aka Smalf A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

**Active Discussions**

I'm glad it helped Smiling

Here's the link you asked for :

http://www.chat-africa.co.za

No problem SD, ask away, it's great to get all the info.

I will have to know first how to use Photoshop before I can start using RAW.

Brian, thanks again for this info. I'll be thinking hard to ask another question Smiling

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