White or grey?

This week, I have some images to share taken during the winter.

The scenes photographed are all close to my home –  the leaf was actually taken in my garden.

There is always a problem in photographing hard frost, snow or bright skies in that the camera will underexpose. It sets the light areas to 18% grey or middle grey and in doing so darkens them. They no longer appear as white. A full explanation of why 18% is used can be seen here. To offset that, exposure will need to be increased to compensate and to ensure whites are white in the image.

The leaf image did not need any EV addition for the frost.  Using the electronic WYSIWYG viewfinder in the Fujifilm X-E2 I could see exactly the type of exposure I wanted.

FROZEN VEINS
Fujifilm X-E2, Fujinon 35mm F/2 R WR

I used the Nikon D800 in this next photograph.  This has an optical viewfinder and so you can’t see through the lens what the exposure will look like unless you use Live View or look at the photograph after you’ve taken it.

In this instance, I estimated that the sky and the snow would make the metering of the Nikon under-expose, so I increased the EV by 2/3 of a stop.

FROZEN MEADOW
Nikon D800, Nikkor 50mm F/1.8 G

In this last image, the sky was the brightest part of the photograph, and so if I had let the camera expose to 18% the sky and the snow would have been grey. So I increased the EV by one complete stop, which meant that the tone of the sky was correct and the snow was depicted as white.

WINTER SKYLINE
Nikon D800, Nikkor 50mm F/1.8 G