Shooting Tips for Winter

Many nature or landscape photographers consider the shooting season to be spring and fall. In spring waterfalls typically run stronger and wildflowers are popping up everywhere while fall shooting is known for it’s a palette of warm foliage colors. These are great times to be out shooting but what about winter? The cold weather and barren deciduous trees are not the best inducement for going outdoors, but then again, winter offers some of the most spectacular photographic opportunities of the year allowing you to add something special to your portfolio that few others have. Snowy captures, whether landscapes or wildlife, are just special, period. So here are a few things to consider before you plan to hunker down for the winter:

1) Winter offers the best light and shooting schedules of the year, especially well north or south of the equator. The days are shorter and the overall quality of the light is at its best since the trajectory of the sun is less straight up and down than summer. Even on the clearest days the light takes longer to get too hot to shoot extending magic hour opportunities. Depending on how far you are from the equator you might find you can shoot most of the day without the light getting overly contrasty, allowing a more productive day.

2) As you know the position of the sun changes everyday rising furthest to the right and setting furthest to the left on the winter solstice. The suns position can make or break a composition so knowing what time of the year the sun rises and sets in a key location allows for some uniquely distinctive compositions – see sunset series from the Empire State Building article.

3) Winter landscapes are just special when everything works. Snow covered trees and mountains, frozen or near frozen rivers and waterfalls, ice crystals, and if you are lucky you may be able to capture snow falling. The rules for shooting in the winter are the same as the summer so you don’t need special filters or other equipment. You should be looking at everything from wide-angle grand vistas to close-ups of interesting ice formations, and long lens landscape extractions to long exposures of moving water. Of course nothing beats a good winter wildlife capture, especially in falling snow.

4) Series: Consider a winter landscape as part of a series of images captured at the same place but different time of the year. If you have a favorite place or favorite tree, or vantage point you love, try capturing it in all four seasons as well as different light and weather conditions.

5) Explore local opportunities like a nearby park, lake, or even the zoo. Zoos are not crowded in winter and some animals thrive in the cold like Siberian tigers, snow leopards and snow monkeys – planning a trip to the zoo when it is snowing can yield some really cool wildlife captures. Whenever I hear about a snowstorm coming my way I try to get out and shoot snow monkeys at the zoo or something else that is interesting local compositions.

Tips:

1) Cooler white balance settings preserve the look and feel of cold. Use a cooler, i.e., lower temperature settings like Sunlight or lower instead of Cloudy to capture a mood or the feeling of cold. A bluish tint can work great for B&W captures. Warm tones for icy captures are often incongruent and don’t work as well. This is this is just a guideline, not a rule, but often the missing element of winter pictures.

2) Shutter Speed when snowing is critical. Too fast and you may not capture the flecks of falling snowflakes, especially smaller flakes, and longer shutter speeds can often capture some nice streaks. Try different speeds to find one that works for a specific composition and weather. No one shutter speed will universally work since it depends on how hard it is snowing, the size of the flakes, and the focal length you are using. Long lens have a smaller FOV and thus capture streaks differently than wide lenses for the same speed since the rate of movement across the composition will differ.

3) Try using Manual Exposure when shooting snow. If the light is constant, especially on overcast or snowing days, it is often much better to manually expose. The reason is that relative amounts of snow vs. dark areas in the composition can trick your camera meter. For example, if you are shooting an environmental portrait of a bison in the snow and then zoom in to made the bison dominate the composition, your camera may meter very differently even though the light is the same. If the light is soft then just find that sweet spot for exposure, then set it and forget it – but don’t forget to check your histogram occasionally.

4) When out in the cold for extended periods with your gear do not bring everything directly inside. Instead either keep your bag completely zipped up or put you bag in a larger plastic trash bag and let it sit inside for a few hours to warm up. If you don’t then you risk getting condensation on your gear.

5) Dress right in the cold. Wool socks, good boots, warm hat, and gloves with fingertips exposed so you can work your gear. Hand and feet warmers, which can be found in most sporting goods stores, can also be a good idea in extreme conditions

I have been fortunate to shoot in places like Yellowstone and Alaska in the dead of winter with temperatures as low as 20F without the winter chill factor, and up to –45F with the wind chill. I can say without hesitation that these, and a few other winter shoots, were some of the most rewarding experiences I have had and yielded some of my best stuff. Don’t just take your camera and hibernate for the winter, get out and shoot something special that will separate your work from others. Here is a portfolio of some of my favorite winter landscapes. Enjoy.

Sunset Series from the Empire State Building

For my first shoot of 2010 I wanted something special and decided to shoot a sunset series from the top of the Empire State Building, the former king of the skyscrapers. Actually, this shoot was planned long ago for this time of the year simply because that is when I knew the sun is in the best position for a balanced composition from this vantage point. (Note; the sun sets furthest left on Dec 21st, the winter solstice, and sets furthest right on June 21st, the summer solstice.) My goal for his shoot, which was very much pre-visualized and well planned, was to capture magic hour (30 minutes before and after sunrise or sunset) from the top New York City’s oldest icon.

As you probably know, pre-visualization is a result of seeing the picture in your minds eye before you go out to shoot it. It often requires planning and for this shoot that planning was all finding my window of opportunity including best time of year for the suns position, time of day, and weather conditions. I looked up the time of year when the sun will be in the position I want for this vantage point. I also waited for the ideal weather conditions - a clear day with not to heavy winds (strong winds this high make it tricky to get sharp handheld captures), and ideally a day outside of the holiday crowds. Knowing the conditions needed I simply wait until everything is right. It is a short shoot but even though this is not too far from home, it is still costly. Parking at the train station in my town, train tickets, and tickets to the top of the Empire State building cost close to $50, not too mention a half-day of time – but the view…

As for the equipment and technique, I used my Nikon D300 and fisheye lens for this series. I had to find the one spot at the top that allowed me to use a lens with a 180 degree field of view and not include the side of the building. I actually had to hold the camera outside the holes in the fence and perfectly align everything, which can be very tricky, especially after dark. I tilted the fisheye lens slightly up to capture the curve of the earth and also composed to place the horizon in the center of the frame to get a more normal looking landscape. For the finished post processed composition I cropped a little off the top to get a more balanced picture. Since the exposure range is greater than the dynamic range of my camera I needed to do hand held HDR’s. The get the sharpest captures with minimal movement from exposure to exposure I shoot in burst mode and adjust the ISO as needed, in this case it ranged from ISO 200 to 2200. Aperture size ranged from f/19 to create a sunstar, to f/3.3 to get plenty of light after sunset. I bracketed one stop above, normal, and one stop below for an extra 2 stops of range. White Balance was set at sunlight to preserve the blue in the sky while capturing the warm glow from the thick New Jersey air near the horizon. However, I also cooled some of the night shots since city streetlights are sodium vapor lamps and similar to tungsten lighting in color. Processing was done in Photomatix and punched up in CS4 including Topaz DeNoise3 to remove high ISO and HDR processing noise. The result was a series of about seven captures from 15 minutes before sunrise to 50 minutes past. Incidentally, if you go about 25 miles from where this shot was taken in the direction of sunset, that’s where I live.

You can see the magic hour series in my NYC Sunrise & Sunset gallery. Enjoy.

How far have you come?

It’s the New Year, the time when many of us make our “New Years Resolutions” by setting new goals for the coming year. It is also a time to look back and see how far we have come with respect to the goals made last year. With regards to my photography, I have an ongoing goal of improvement. I strive to be better this year than last, and better next year than today. I measure my progress through questions like, have I learned any new capture or post processing techniques to create new or better looks? Is my ability to plan and previsualize even better now then a year ago? Am I experimenting with something new and gaining a better understanding of how and when to use it? Am I following the pack or going my own way? These are some of the benchmarks I use to gauge my progress in the ongoing quest to be a better photographer and create better and better pictures. I say picture not photo since I believe photography is an art and not simply a method of documenting the world around us – let the photojournalists do that. Our capture and post processing skills along with artistic license give us a means to create different versions of a capture and the resulting picture is a result of ones personal vision or preference limited by his or hers imagination and digital darkroom skills.

One tangible way to of ‘seeing’ how far your photography has come is to create a folder or web gallery that includes your best or favorites of the past year. It can be your top 10, top 25 or top 100, (10 might be too few and 100 might be too many but you get the idea). It can include your best pictures of the year or instead a few of your best for each location or event, or simply the best of each genre you shoot like sunsets, waterfalls, buildings, portraits, animals… Selecting and reviewing your best or favorite work is a great way to measure your progress and take pride in your accomplishments plus it gives you a tangible benchmark for next year to compare back to. I know that some of my pictures I took years ago that I considered great at the time are now below my current standard either in composition or the post processed end result. At or around New Year’s Day is great time to see how far you have come, define your strengths and weaknesses, and set personal goals for improvement in the coming year. Strive for progress not perfection and you will rarely be disappointed.

Happy New Year and remember, if you don’t get older and wiser, then you just get older. BTW, here are some of my favorites of 2009.