photography

Red Engines in the Snow

Yesterday, Saturday March 6, 2021, Kris Sabbatino and I visited White River Junction, Vermont.

Hard crusty snow covered the ground under a bright polarized sky. Visually appealing conditions, but contrast and difficult to capture.

Key to making successful snow photos is exposing for the snow correctly.

If the snow is overexposed (too light), detail is lost and it becomes an amorphous white blob. If it is underexposed, then the snow will be rendered gray and other elements of the scene appear too dark.

Most automatic camera metering does not recognize snow and has a inherent bias to render it as gray instead of white, which if left unattended at the time of exposure will result in an underexposed file.

For this photo, I exposed manually. I gauged my exposure from experience, and allow the meter to read 2/3s of a stop over exposure. This still renders texture in the snow, but allows for easy corrections for the rest of scene in post production.

Below I display two versions of the camera RAW file exposed with my Nikon Z6 (NEF format). The top is the scaled but unmodified file. The bottom has been adjusted to make the most of the data recorded and lighten shadow areas while correcting color balance.

Vermont Rail System EMD diesels idle on the former Boston & Maine at White River Junction.
This the Adobe Lightroom work window showing the position of correction sliders after corrections were implemented to the create the second version.

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