The Roving Photographer's Snow Photos
Snow at Midnight
In snow photos shot at night, images take on a nearly black and white quality
In contrast to the effect of golden hour sunlight seen on other snow photos pages (Backyard Fence and Shooting Away from the Sun), shooting at midnight during a snowfall takes away all warmth from an image, not to mention from my body!
New Year's Eve, 2008, brought a wonderful blanket of snow to the roving photographer's neck of the woods. My Nikon D300 was only a few weeks old and I thought that snow at night would be a good way to test its mettle. Working from my covered front porch, my camera was protected from the falling snow ... and I was able to quickly run indoors if I got too cold!
To keep things simple, I worked with a single subject, a pine tree lit with off-white LED's.
Composition
I started with wide angle shots that turned out to be full of distractions from the surrounding neighborhood before I settled on this close in shot of the base of the tree. The strength of this final composition is in the play between the heavier and darker masses of snow-burdened branches to the left with the brighter and less massive branches on the right.
Nikon D300, Nikkor 18 - 200 mm VR @ 200 mm, ISO 200,
2.5s, f/5.6.
Lit from within, and shot at midnight, this pine tree has a monochrome feel typical of many close-in snow photos. You might be tempted to think this was taken in black and white mode, but if you roll your mouse over it you will see a true black and white version. This may be hard to see at first, so watch the bright spot at lower left as you mouse over then out.
The lights from inside the tree give the image depth. While I was mostly lucky enough that the lights were hidden from direct view, you can see one light that peeps from behind a branch at the top right. In truth, there was one more light and bit of cord sticking out to the right of that, which I edited out - I have no strong convictions against doctoring an image, although I usually try to avoid it.
Sharpness
Knowing that the light was low and that I'd need a long exposure, I pulled out my trusty, but somewhat rickety, aluminum tripod and screwed my camera to it. I have a sturdier tripod now, but the old tripod does well for long exposures with no wind. On the other hand, but is not so great for intermediate exposures (1/15s to 2 or 3 seconds) as it can shake a bit with the DSLR mirror flipping or just a finger pressing the shutter release.
Turns out that my exposures would be in that intermediate range, so I took two precautions:
- I used a shutter release cable so I wouldn't introduce any hand shake
- I used a feature on the camera that flips the mirror up two seconds before it opens the shutter.
Together, these worked well toward delivering a sharp image.
Exposure
The main exposure question for this night's snow photos was around white balance. LED's are different from incandescent lights, although my wife and I purposely looked for warm white LED's to look as much like our older incandescent bulbs as possible.
I started with the camera's "auto" white balance setting. That worked pretty well, but it turned out that the "incandescent" white balance setting did even better. That left me pleasantly surprised at how well the LED's were able to mimic incandescent.
One thing you might notice about snow photos like this is how little color there is in the image. It almost looks like a monochrome image. It's easy to see that there is a bit of warmth from the lights, but you may not be able to see the deep green of the pine needles, which is hard to see even in the full-sized version of this image. For comparison, if you roll your mouse over the image you'll see it change to a pure black and white image.
Snow photos aren't the only subject that appear almost black and white. I achieved a similar effect at the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart, Germany by photographing a white vintage Mercedes with chrome exhaust pipes in a dark room.
|
