Photographing White Snowy Landscapes

Photographing bright white snowy landscapes is one of the trickiest tasks in  photography, if you're a beginner using reflective metering. When everything is white, the camera calculates an exposure that will render it medium gray. The result is often flat and disappointing, unless you know how to correct for it. I did a fun study of snow covering a wooden fence and tree in a field near the Horicon Marsh. I had my trusty Sekonic L-758 incident meter with me. The incident meter measures the light illuminating the scene, rather than the light reflecting off of the scene, so it renders tones accurately. The highly reflective snow doesn't fool the incident meter because the meter doesn't "see" the snow or any other tones. It "sees" only the light illuminating the scene and calculates an exposure for that light. I made the image at ISO 400, but I don't remember the rest of the settings and don't care to look them up. The more important thing is the color technique.

Photographing White Snowy Landscapes There are multiple ways to accurately photograph white snowy landscapes in terms of color. Start with a raw file. One technique is to do a custom white balance in camera with a white balance card. Look up instructions for how to do that with your camera model. With Nikon, you set the white balance to Pre, activate waiting mode and then take a shot of the white card in the same light as the subject. Another method is to simply take a test photograph of the white card in the scene in the same light as the subject. Photograph the scene as normal. Then in post production you click the card with the white balance picker in a program like Lightroom. This works best with raw files since, with raw, you have unlimited latitude for adjusting white balance in post.

Summary I'd prefer more depth of field but I didn't have the tripod with me, so I couldn't use the lower shutter speeds that would have allowed smaller apertures. I also didn't want to raise the ISO any more. Lightroom did the BW conversion and there's a slight blue tone just to give it a more silvery look. There are numbers of ways to warm or cool this image with split toning.