Techniques for Winter Digital Photography

Winter digital photography can be an exhilarating experience. Winter brings with it its own unique beauty worth capturing in digital photographs, as we as its own set of challenges for the photographer. Knowing how to deal with the digital photography issues in winter will allow you to better capture the splendor of snow and ice.

by Rajendran Varma

Equipment for Winter Digital Photography

Two important considerations for digital photographers in winter are comfort and safety. Therefore, it is imperative to dress warmly and in layers for your digital photography trips in winter. The low temperatures also cause digital camera batteries to run dry faster, so make sure to take extra batteries. Condensation can also cause problems for your camera hardware, so take precautions such as not breathing directly on your camera.

Lighting for Winter Digital Photography

The light reflected off snow and ice during winter makes for very interesting lighting conditions for digital photography. However, this reflected light is very often the problem with winter photography since you can end up with too much light in your digital photographs. This results in reduced contrast and less details as well as washed out colors. One solution that is not intuitive is to use flash to help balance the light off the snow and ice, and fill in darker areas. Many newer digital cameras also have adaptive lighting technology to deal with high contrast scenes you are likely to encounter in winter digital photography.

White Balance in Winter Digital Photography

White balance can be especially tricky in winter digital photography. White balance is meant to balance colors in a shot based on the lighting conditions. However, very dark and very bright scenes can be tricky situations for your camera’s white balance, and causes winter digital photographs to turn out dark and grayish because the camera underexposes the scene. Therefore it is important to manually control settings to adjust the white balance in you digital camera. Newer digital cameras often have winter shooting modes that do this automatically.

Contrast and Color

Winter’s photographs are especially striking when the bare, white landscape is punctuated by contrasting and colorful subjects. Trees, mountains, wildlife and people all make interesting subjects for winter digital photography. The interesting patterns and textures that are unique to winter also make for intriguing subjects. As always, experiment with different shooting angles and digital camera settings.

View Amazing Winter Digital Photography

Photography 101: White Balance Demystified

White balance is a very important concept in digital photography, and involves the process of measuring light and colors. Understanding how it works will allow you to do wonders with your digital photography.

by Jennifer Clarkson

The term “white balance” originates from the world of video imaging where a device (waveform monitor) was used to match or “balance” the signals from the camera’s red, green, and blue channels to make accurate whites under various lighting conditions, thus balancing your white. In this article, we’ll use “white balance” for digital cameras in a similar sense: the process of measuring your light source’s color temperature accurately, based on your lighting conditions, and using that information to correctly balance your whites and colors.

Symptoms of Poorly Set White Balance
If your digital camera’s white balance is set incorrectly, or if your digital camera chose the wrong algorithm for measuring color temperature, then you will observe a color cast on your digital photo: it will either look slightly blue, slightly orange, or slightly green. A low color temperature shifts light toward the red; a high color temperature shifts light toward the blue. Different light sources emit light at different color temperatures, and thus the color cast. Let’s take a look.

What is Color Temperature and How Is It Measured?
Color temperature is effectively the warmth that is emitted from a light source, and the effect that temperature has on the intensity of any particular color in the visible spectrum. For example, a 200 W bulb has more intensity in the orange/red end, and shows purples and blues with very little intensity. This makes your photo appear “warm”. Daylight has equivalent intensity across the whole spectrum, so you see purples and blues with the same intensity as oranges and reds. But shade or a heavily overcast sky has more intensity in the blue/purple end, so your oranges and reds will have very little intensity. This makes your photo appear “cool”.

Here are some examples of color temperatures from common light sources:
1500 K: candle light
2800 K: 60 W bulb
3200 K: sunrise and sunset (will be affected by smog)
3400 K: tungsten lamp (ordinary household bulb)
4000-5000 K: cool white fluorescent bulbs
5200 K: bright midday sun
5600 K: electronic photo flash.
6500 K: heavily overcast sky
10000-15000 K: deep blue clear sky

Newer light sources, such as fluorescent and other artificial lighting, require further white balance adjustments since they can make your photos appear either green or magenta.

How Does a Digital Camera Auto-Detect White Balance?
Your digital camera searches for a reference point in your scene that represents white. It will then calculate all the other colors based on this white point and the known color spectrum. The data measured from its R G B sensors is then run through a whole lot of numbers and predetermined equations to figure out which white balance setting is most likely to be correct. Remember, white balance is the automatic adjustment that makes sure the white color humans observe will also appear white in the image.

Setting your digital camera’s white balance to auto white balance (AWB) will provide color accuracy under many conditions. Your digital camera will adjust the white balance between 4000K – 7000K using a best guess algorithm. Auto white balance is a good choice for situations where the light changes over time and speed is an issue (e.g. animal photography, sports photography). However, you should avoid using auto white balance settings in the following situations:

1. Your scene is heavily dominated by one color
2. Color accuracy is absolutely imperative
3. You are photographing particularly warm or cool scenes (e.g. a sunset)

White Balance Presets
Most digital cameras come with multiple white balance preset options. These presets work well when:

1. The light source matches one of the preset white balance options
2. Your scene is heavily dominated by one color

Common Preset Options:

• Tungsten - "Tungsten" is the name of the metal out of which the bulb's filament is made. The color temperature of this setting is fixed at 3,000K. Best Use: indoors at night. Otherwise, your exposure will turn out too blue. Creative Use: Set your exposure compensation to -1 or -2 and use this setting in daylight to simulate night.


• Fluorescent - The color temperature of this setting is fixed at 4,200K. Best use: Fluorescent, mercury, HMI and metal halide lights used in your garage, sports stadiums and parking lots. Otherwise, your exposure will turn out too purple.


• Daylight - The color temperature of this setting is fixed at 5,200K. Best use: studio strobe lights. Otherwise, your exposure may have a slight bluish tinge.


• Cloudy - The color temperature of this setting is fixed at 6,000K. Best use: direct sunlight and overcast light. This setting will warm your photo by giving it an orange tinge, which is often desirable in landscapes and portraits. Creative Use: sunsets.


• Shade - The color temperature of this setting ranges from 7,000K - 8,000K. Best use: shooting in shade, no direct sunlight (cloudy), backlit subjects. Otherwise, your exposure will turn out too orange. Creative Use: direct sunlight – it will warm up your photos even more!


• Flash - The color temperature of this setting is fixed at 5,400K. This is almost identical to Cloudy but sometimes redder depending on the camera. Best use: overcast skies. Otherwise, your exposure will turn out too red.

About the Author: Jennifer Clarkson is a Canadian photographer living in Ottawa. For more Photography Tips, and to browse her Photo Galleries, please visit her website at www.jclarksonphotography.com

Understanding Digital Photography White Balance

In digital photography terms, and traditional, you will most likely hear the term “white balance” quite a lot. It’s an important meaning because many digital photography enthusiasts concentrate on the lenses and digital camera without first learning about how light works.

In a nutshell, “white balance” in digital photography relates to the ‘temperature’ of light. If you notice when doing your digital photography indoors, the photo will have a bluish colour through out the digital photo. Then if you take your digital photography outside you will notice the photo then has a warmer tone to it. This is your white balance feature on your digital camera working to adjust the image.

To give you a direct example of how white balance works in your digital photography think of this; have you ever noticed how your colour pictures come out a more bluish tone in the shade? The problem is that because light has temperature, the camera has to analyze this change in its own limited way compared to the human eye.

You can help reduce the blue by altering the setting on the camera or adding a warmer color filter such as yellow. Some colour filters have different shades or hues of the same colour. Each warmer colour filter moves towards a warmer feel and increases in density.

Your white balance in digital photography also works when you walk into an office building. The fluorescent light might be different from that of the doctor’s or a drug store? Well, you’re not imagining things! The reason is there are over 40 different ranges of fluorescent lights and the problem for us digital photographers is that each one has its own colour temperature. It’s not to be avoided, please no! It just means you need to be aware that all florescent lighting is not the same and that you’ll have to consider this when shooting under this type of light.

You can work well with white balance by switching indoor shots to an “outdoor” setting to eliminate the bluish tone in indoor shots. And alternatively you can set the white balance mode to “indoor” when you are outside to reduce some golden/yellow saturation in your outside digital photography shots.

About the Author: Amy Renfrey is the author of two major successful ebooks “Digital Photography Success” and “Advanced Digital Photography”. She is a photographer and also teaches digital photography. She’s photographed many things from famous musicians to portraits of babies. Amy also teaches photography online to her students at Digital Photography Success.