Normally during the fall we are graced with rich yellow, reds and oranges but mother nature had a surprise for us at the beginning of November; a significant snowfall.
Normally I might balk at taking pictures in the snow. I’ve found that snowfall is typically accompanied by gloomy days but with this assignment on the horizon, I wondered how I could combat the grey skies for a fall image. I thought to myself, well, I could just not take a picture of the sky.
I’ve seen some remarkable images of snow that included dramatic texture and that is what inspired me to do a closeup of snow while including a leaf to indicate fall, add some contrasting textures and a pop of color. Since I was experiencing focusing issues on the previous macro shoot (as well as some portrait shoots) I did some research and compiled a YouTube Playlist that explores the different focusing modes and custom functions of my camera.
This new knowledge and drilling helped me to streamline focusing. I am going to have to continue to drill as I have my camera set to no longer use the shutter half press for autofocus. The back buttons now control autofocus and AF stop/hold.
I also wanted to use a strobe to have some say so in lighting direction. I used a Godox V1 Roundhead flash on a table top flexible tripod set to High Speed Sync without any modifiers to add some scrape lighting to the snow so that the powdery texture and contrast would appear. I had to use plastic bags to keep the flash from getting wet.
As I was shooting I noticed that while I was getting proper meter readings and decent exposure on the snow at 1/250, f/5.0 (shown above), the leaf seemed flat and lifeless; a little under exposed. It’s like the snow and the leaf are competing with one another to for data space. Since my camera was already set up on a tripod I decided to shot multiple exposures in order to create an HDR digital negative for this project.
To accomplish this I shot in what I call expanded bracketing, keeping the aperture set to f/5.0; shooting 16 frames of the same composition starting on 1/1000th of a second and third stopping up all the way through to 1/30th of a second. We want to use shutter speed to control exposure here as we want the depth of field to be consistent on each image. These images are all imported into Lightroom Class so that they can be compiled into an HDR digital negative using the Photo Merge function. Then it’s just a matter of playing with the exposure, contrast, saturation, texture and clarity sliders in LrC.
Applying the HDR technique generates a more interesting image and gives us more than just shooting a single metered photograph. The exposure appear more consistent on the snow and the leaf.
A big take away from this project is re-examining the limiting belief that I can’t take pictures in the snow. A lot of this belief is informed from my film days, where white balance and exposure can be thrown off by snow. I can remember customers bringing rolls of 800 speed color film of their ski trip and not understanding why they pictures were so over-exposed.
With digital, a lot of this issues seem mitigated and adjustments can be made on the fly. Now that I have a collection of lights, how can I use these to combat those gloomy days? I can also hope that the sun makes an appearance while there is still snow on the ground that would make for some fun golden hour shoots.