what settings to use when its snowy

[greenops]

well im going to take me cameara with me to red river new mexico and it snows there with the sun bouncing off the snow creating extra light and all of the factors what would be the best setting (i have a cannon power shot a620)

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

Handle it differently at Mountain Tops vs down in the city. I would take a polarizing filter along.

[jeffkohn]

One good way to determine exposure is to spot-meter the brightest part of the snow you want to maintain detail in, and over-expose 1.33 - 2 stops from the meter reading. If your camera doesn't have spot metering you can try center weighted metering though you probably won't need to overexpose as much. With matrix metering it's tough because you never really know what the meter is going to do, although generally at least some overexposure will be required.

Regardless of how you determine exposure, it's always good to check the histogram, and shoot again if there isn't any image details in the right 1/3 of the histogram or if you see blown highlights. Oncey you get familiar with how your camera handles these situations will get easier.

[greenops]

Originally Posted by jeffkohn

One good way to determine exposure is to spot-meter the brightest part of the snow you want to maintain detail in, and over-expose 1.33 - 2 stops from the meter reading. If your camera doesn't have spot metering you can try center weighted metering though you probably won't need to overexpose as much. With matrix metering it's tough because you never really know what the meter is going to do, although generally at least some overexposure will be required.

Regardless of how you determine exposure, it's always good to check the histogram, and shoot again if there isn't any image details in the right 1/3 of the histogram or if you see blown highlights. Oncey you get familiar with how your camera handles these situations will get easier.

...uhm... so are you saying focus on brightest part of snow and have fast exposer??? you totaly lost me lol

[Nevyn]

Originally Posted by greenops

...uhm... so are you saying focus on brightest part of snow and have fast exposer??? you totaly lost me lol

No, not focus,meter (ie measure the required exposure) for the brightest part of the image.
There's a difference. Focus is, well, where it's focused. Metering is working out the aperture and exposure times.

Just looked at the specs for your camera (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canona620/)
I can't see anywhere it says you have exposure lock so I'd suggest you try using manual exposure mode as follows:

Set the camera to manual exposure mode (NOT manual focus mode) and spot metering.
Set the exposure for the brightest part of the snow using the manual exposure and spot metering. You want the cameras spot meter to tell you that the snow will be overexposed by 1.5 to 2 stops.
[Alternatively, you can set the AE exposure compensation to +1.5EV and then set it to whatever the camera says is the correct exposure. If you don't follow that last sentence, then ignore it and stick to the first bit.]

Then, without changing the aperture or shutter speed (this is the reason you're in manual exposure mode), recompose the image and focus, then hit the shutter.

Check the image histogram to make sure you haven't blown out the highlights.
(I assume you know what I mean by this.)

The reason you do all this is because of how camera meters work. They have no idea what they are looking at so they assume that if you average out all the tones (brightness levels, ignoring the color side of things) in any scene, the average comes out to a mid gray tone.
The camera meter will try and expose whatever they are measuring to that mid-gray tone -ie a pure white scenes will come out too dark while a pure black scene would come out too light. If you have a lot of bright white in a scene (eg snow) it will fool the camera's meter into under expsosing the image in order to get the average tone back down to that mid-gray point it's aiming at.
What you're trying to do above is force the camera to ignore most of the scene and correctly expose the snow (as far as the camera is concerned you'll be over exposing it by 1.5 to 2EV)

[84NETgal]

You may find my "nordic shooting tips" thread to be of use here. Rule of thumb--overexpose, but it really depends on how much sunlight is available. Full sun, no clouds really makes the snow white anyway in the camera, so i wouldn't over expose by more than 1/3 EV. Other times I had to overexpose by as much as 1.3 or 1.6 EV, so it really is all relative. Also, I recommend putting the white balance setting on the "daylight" equivalent, as AWB and "cloudy/shade" settings can make it look too dull and warm, respectively.

Here's the (rather long) thread full of tips: http://www.texasphotoforum.com/forum...ad.php?t=17647