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F/5.6
ISO 100
exposure 1/500Here’s a picture with my new sigma manual-focus lens 70-300.
- This topic was modified 54 years, 11 months ago by .
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Interesting, albeit a bit cluttered. One thing that I noticed that is a common problem with snow pictures… The image is actually quite severely underexposed. Whenever I’m taking pictures of a snow covered landscape, I have to bump the exposure compensation up at least 1 stop, and often up to 2 stops.
Here’s an article that explains some of the reasoning behind overexposing for snow. http://www.geofflawrence.com/snow.html
The following excerpt is copied from that article. (This is just the part that explains about exposure compensation, you should read the whole article for even more tips)
The chances are that you are reading this article because you have tried taking photos in the snow and have ended up with a batch of rather dull, under exposed, shots. This is because you have left the camera on automatic and have not applied any exposure compensation.When the camera is left to calculate the exposure by itself, it tries to read all the tones and colors in the scene and integrate to gray. What integrate to gray means is that, if you add up all the values of all the tones and colors and average them out you will arrive at a mid gray tone. This system works extremely well for over 90% of all photographs. Imagine a typical scene with some sky, a few trees, and bit of ground and some people in the middle. Add up all the tones and you will come out to, near enough, mid gray every time.
Obviously this system falls down quite a lot, in fact 10% of the time and, if you are a more creative photographer than most, and tend to photograph more unusual subjects, you will find that it breaks down even more often. Despite more sophisticated metering modes on the better cameras which will favor what is in the center of the frame, photography in the snow is just too taxing because of the extremes of contrast, especially on a sunny day.
The camera, left to it’s own devices, will try to render as much detail as it can, especially in the highlights. Which, under normal circumstances, is exactly what we want.
Nothing is worse than burnt out highlights, normally I would much rather see no detail in the shadows of a picture than burnt out highlights.
But snow is an exception to the rule, we see snow as white, we want to see some detail in it if possible but we are willing to accept large areas of white in the picture, we would rather see detail in the people and objects we are photographing.
I have a whole folder of pictures from a photo-shoot that I did in Estonia. There was probably 8 inches of snow on everything, and I happily shot 50 or so pictures, and every one of them was a murky gray. Needless to say, none of those pictures are in my portfolio of “Good Shots”. 🙂
BTW, congratulations on your new lens! Could it be that the reason it is manual-focus, is that your D3100 doesn’t have a built-in focus motor?
I got quite a bit of use out of my Sigma 70-300. Mine was called a “macro” lens, and it actually did quite well in that regard. Of course when doing macro, I used manual focus anyways, but auto-focus is nice for every-day shooting.
Agreed. Underexposed and blue?
I would like to see it with the trees in the background in focus also.I didn’t know about that…I probably let my camera on automatic as usual,
and yes, my D3100 do not have a built-in-focus motor:(
Except the fact that my images are all blurry at 200-300 while shooting wildlife (It doesn’t have an image stabilizator) I really like that lens, especially with the 300 macro switch.Nice and sharp! Don’t you love knowing your camera well enough that you don’t have to have the subject in the center for it to be properly focused?
In terms of composition, there’s too much distance between the first, foreground post and the second post for me to easily make the connection that it’s a fence continuing on into the background. Resolve this by stepping slightly more to the left.
Also, it feels like the first post is too close to the left side. There needs to be more breathing room over there between the post and the edge of the picture. Stepping slightly to the left would solve this problem as well.
I agree with James about taking the shot slightly more to the left, closer to the fence, to improve the composition. I think I would also have tried to move the twig that’s next to the fence post out of view. Still it’s an appealing photo, if only because I enjoy the snow in (what appears to be) a country setting.
Another idea – I think this has potential as a b&w, with slight adjustment to lighting to make it even more crisp. And if the fence post was really old and gnarled, with lots of visual interest and character, you could consider cropping it to a portrait orientation. This makes it less of a landscape shot, and the fence post really becomes the only subject. I took the liberty of trying this with your photo. The resolution is not looking too good – getting pixelated, but you can get the idea. What do you think?
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