Monica posted on December 17, 2008 15:01 :: 3620 Views
A lot of people are whining about the snow. I hope you’re not one of them.
It came roaring through here over the weekend in twisting and spinning clouds of wind-driven torment that, admittedly, has to be shoveled and snowblowed and scraped and plowed.
But anybody reading this is probably a photographer. And photographers—intrepid northwoods photographers—never complain about the snow. They don’t even spell it as a four-letter word. They spell it o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y.
Snow is full of drama. Winter itself is full of drama. Here along Lake Superior, the temperature contrast between land and water creates delicious fogs and mists that sometimes wisp their way across the surface, and sometimes tower and glower over the landscape. Anybody can shoot pretty little summer shimmers; but winter’s rugged visage is the stop-you-in-your-tracks mien that makes people do double-takes.
If you’re going to get out and shoot winter, do it smart. Dress for it. Equip for it. Don’t, for instance, go out in a waste-length jacket and no hat, shod only in athletic shoes. Wear a longer, hip-covering coat, roomy enough to stick your camera inside in between shots, where the warm will help preserve the battery.
Pull a hat down over your ears, or wear ear muffs, but also wear your hood. (I never buy a winter coat that doesn’t have one.) It keeps the snow glare out of your eyes and helps deflect the wind.
Warm boots with good traction that you can tuck your pants into will keep you upright and dry. Thinsulate lined gloves, or something like them, will allow you to keep your hands warm and still have the flexibility to operate your camera.
Most important, keep spare batteries on hand, in an inside pocket where the cold won’t suck the life out of them. I’m lucky. Both my cameras use proprietary batteries, instead of the off-the-shelf AAs. While it’s true those are less expensive, they hold their charges for a much shorter time. I’ve had both my cameras out in the cold for hours, and the charge lasted. If you’re buying a camera, check the kind of batteries they require.
OK, that’s the boring basic stuff. Once you’ve got that all taken care of, there remains only to roust yourself from the comfortable warmth of your house and answer winter’s challenge. For me, that means head to the waterfront. I have a big lake that just loves to put on a show. When it’s not draping itself in frozen mist, it’s coating the shoreline cliffs with ice or flocking the surrounding foliage.
In lieu of that, any creek or pond will do. Winter does magical things to water, even when it’s just a trickle. Ice formations along even the smallest puddle paint pictures that aren’t there in the summer, and aren’t obvious unless you have a photographer’s eye. Birds—the ones who hang around—are easier to spot, and the animals you don’t see leave tracks you do, creating interesting designs and commentary.
One word of advice. Winter is also full of contrasts: blindingly white snow and dark shadows. Your camera can’t do both at the same time. I tend to meter for the whites, because if you lose the details there, you can’t retrieve them. Metering for the white means the darks will be very dark—but a good photo program can rescue some of those details. And, believe it or not, if you want the whites to be really white, you’ll have to overexpose a stop or two, because your camera wants to make everything medium gray. It tends to darken the whites, and lighten the blacks.
If you mess it up, again, a photo program will help. It won’t work miracles, but it will help. I used to think it was cheating to use photo programs until I realized they are my dark room, where I can do the “burning and dodging” once used to tweak images on film.
The last important point: once you’ve faced winter and come home with your trophies, upload some of them here at JustNorth. It’s not bragging. It’s proof that you’re not a winter whiner.
Live Life Joyfully,
Monica Isley
View more of this author's photography.
Monica Isley is a former newspaper reporter/columnist/photographer who once stalked the Lake Superior shoreline in northeastern Minnesota, camera in hand. She now lives in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., where the summers are warmer and the winters are milder than she's used to, but where photographic prey is just as available. Besides this column for JustNorth, she writes a blog called Monica's Pen at http://monicaspen.wordpress.com/
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