Winter Photography Mini Tutorial Part 1 :

I know I have said this before, but for those of you who have missed it, you must take care when bringing your camera out of a warm environment into a cold one, and returning it from a cold environment to a warm one.

Your camera much like you, needs to acclimate. By not taking the time to do this you could not only risk getting condensation on the lensĀ which is more of a pain than anything, to getting water into the delicate inner workings of your camera. If you have ever spilled coffee or any type of liquid onto and into your laptop, nuff said.

One of the best, quickest and most inexpensive ways to acclimate your camera is place it in a ziplock plastic baggie and then bring it out of the camera case in the new environment. Wait a minute or two, unzip the bag and presto, no condensation and happy camera .

Winter Photography Mini Tutorial Part 2:

My snow is blue! Help!

Well there are a couple of things to do. First off is your White Balance setting tuned to auto? Don’t know what White Balance is? Read your manual silly! White balance describes the color temperature that your camera sees. Your camera basically sees everything in 18% grey. White balance helps adjust it for different lighting conditions. You can find these settings in your menu.

Usually there is auto, sunny, shade, cloudy, tungsten, florescent, flash, custom and kelvin. The Kelvin Scale measures color temperature. Low end is cool or blue, high end is Red or hot. Daylight and sun is about 5200-5000 Kelvin. OK, want more on that, read the manual.

Setting a custom white balance will give you the best results. The second thing you can do is bump up your exposure compensation. Since your camera meters on the mid tones, it tends to under expose the snow, causing the blue cast. Every camera is different, so try + 1/3, +2/3 until the snow starts looking like its should. More tomorrow campers