Snow, Snow, Snow
How to get the blue out of your snow pictures
We certainly have enough of this white stuff and from the looks of things, we are pretty sure to get more before the end of the season. That being said, we may as well make the best of it. Some people like to ski; some snowshoe or ice skate, and some of us like to photograph it. I personally love to snowshoe and photograph at the same time!
How many times have you gone out after a storm to take some beautiful pictures of newly fallen white snow only to go home and find that your white snow is blue in all or some of your pictures?
As great as some of the new cameras are, they just don’t ‘see’ and adjust as well as human eyes. I bet you are thinking, “How do I fix this?” Well, there are a couple of easy adjustments that you can do with your camera, whether it is a point & shoot or a DSLR that will help make your snow photographs look more natural and less blue.
First, it helps to know why this is happening. The blue snow happens when your camera doesn’t recognize what snow looks like in the shade. Our eyes realize this, however, sometimes the camera doesn’t, even if you have the white balance on auto. (By the way, white balance is the adjustment that tells the camera what kind of light you are shooting in.) On most digital cameras (point & shoot and DSLR) you will have a dial or menu item with settings that say auto, sunlight, shade, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent, and custom, etc. Most of the time you will have the camera set to auto and let the camera brain make the adjustments. However, sometimes as in snow photos you may have to ‘trick’ the camera. The simple fix is to change the white balance setting to shade. This setting tells the camera that all the light hitting the main subject is coming from indirect sources from the sun. If your camera has a ‘snow’ white balance setting, you can try this also.
Another fix for blue snow is to do a quick white balance fix in post-production using a photo-editing program like Photoshop or Light Room.
OK, now that you know what to do to get the blue out, get out there and enjoy all this snow. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
Happy shooting!