There are so many beautiful images to be had when it’s snowing. There are so many things that you can do! Slow shutter speeds, fast shutter speeds, shutter drag with a rear curtain flash, black and white, color, high ISO grain, landscapes, portraits, details, documentary… I might even suggest you go shoot next year’s Christmas card photo and have them printed up for a more personal touch next year.

One of the trickiest things about shooting in the winter and snow is the white balance. In a nutshell, most digital cameras, if they’re set on auto white balance, read the scene and look for something that is 18-percent gray, and if they don’t find it they adjust your image to the closest thing.

If the day is cloudy, like today, it’s easy to set your camera to a cloudy white balance and it’ll be in the neighborhood or to set the white balance manually. You might have to adjust the EV to -.7 or -1 to compensate for the camera making the whites too white. If you’re shooting in the bright sun, it’s probably best to set your white balance manually or try the daylight white balance. You’ll most than likely need to lower your EV value or bright areas will be “blown out.” If you shoot in the shadows make sure you change it back over to cloudy.

It was a very cold, overcast and snowy day much like today when I shot this image last week in Idaho. I manually set the white balance on the image to 4300K, slightly on the colder side of things, so I could make sure that the grey wall in the background of this image stayed a cool blue-gray and that the snow didn’t have an unnatural warm glow to it. The berries took care of themselves colorwise, and you can even see some variation where the light was coming through an opening a little differently.