Exposing for bright snow?

[Ufatz]

Okay, whats the latest on exposing for snow. I have just started to play with a D50 and the cheap, basic lens. Shooting in full Auto...is there anything you can do to make sure snow is bright white? Or do you use aperture priority and overexpose a stop? Or.....?

Out where I live it appears to be snowing a bit this afternoon!!!!

[MARINERMAGNUM]

yes,you can bump the exp. up 1 or 2 stops. if the sky is clear,i meter off the sky.

we have the worst ice storm in 25 yrs. going on right now. there is 300-400 tree branches laying on my yard

[Steve Foss]

How much to allow the snow to overexpose depends a lot on how important it is in your image. If you're shooting subjects against snow and the snow isn't a main character in the drama, you can overexpose it more in order to more properly expose a darker subject (like a dog or a person's face). If it's a landscape image, the snow is important, and you need to expose the image so there is still detail in those snow highlights.

One way to get a starting point when shooting subjects against snow is to get very close to the subject so it fills more than half your frame, then meter it and note the settings, then back off and switch to manual to duplicate the settings. This works best when you don't care if you blow out the snow a little bit. If you're shooting people and you don't want to ruin the moment that way, you can just hold your bare hand in front of your camera and get the settings that way.

It's best to experiment and see how things will look by bracketing a few images and checking your histogram and how the image looks on the back of the camera.