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Thanksgiving and Snow pictures

November 25, 2004

Back in ‘82, I had a job in a photo processing lab that catered to advertising photographers.  But the owner knew his bread would pick up a lot of butter if we also processed people’s snapshots as well, so we put in a drive-up window and several kiosks, and watched the 35mm rolls come rolling in.

I learned to expect several things: 

  • After the 4th of July, we would have a couple hundred rolls of pictures with the backs of people’s heads washed out by flash, and a tiny, blurry fireworks display in the middle of the picture.

  • After any major concert, we would have a couple hundred rolls of pictures of the backs of people’s heads washed out by flash, and a tiny stage in the middle that may or may not have been the featured performer’s act.
  • After the first snow, we’d get several hundred rolls of pictures of… well, pictures of grey snow, as if it was the first time anybody had ever seen snow up in the mountains of East Tennessee.  But snow isn’t grey.

You know that snow is white; so do I and so does a five-year-old child.  But cameras back then did not know that snow is white…

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Automatic exposure systems tried to make pictures that averaged out to 18% grey.  For most pictures, that was fine.  Green foliage works out to that density, as do most scenes.  But snow is white, not grey.  The camera simply forces down exposure until the film gets a nice grey image.  Some compensation could be applied at the processing level but it never looked as good as it would if some manual control had been exercised.

Your digital camera may be smarter than its 1982 film counterpart, but it still does not know that snow is white. If you allow your camera to set its own exposure on snow, it will ratchet down until the result will look like the first example above: the snow is gray, the shadows are dark, and it just doesn’t look “right.”

You can fix this effect by using your camera’s “exposure compensation” controls to force an additional +1 or +1.5 stops exposure on the image.  In the second example above, the photographer (aware that “snow is white”) compensated the exposure by adding +1 stop.  The sunlit snow looks bright (as it should) and shadows are well illuminated by reflected light. 

Why write this?  I dunno, except it’s Thanksgiving day, we’re buried under beautiful snow, and I just wish I could have had a web page back in ‘82 to put tips like this out for our customers.  Wherever you are now, folks, enjoy!

We are planning the traditional TGD meal, with MrsDOF cooking a fresh, free-range turkey, making pumpkin dessert-squares, and 2 of my sons here to keep us company.  It’s so wonderful hearing them laughing and cutting up. 

Have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Categories: Geeky