Advice needed for photographing snow

[Digital Guy]

20 years ago when it snowed I used film camera to take awesome pictures. The other day when it snowed I drove around with my Canon camera with 10-22mm lens and not impressed with the results.

What advice is there for shooting snow scenes or ice skating events?

[SteveG]

Same rules as film apply: dark subject on bright background so you have to over-expose to make the whites white. Spot metering of the dark subject also works, but might clip the snow, so be careful.

If you've got the time then you can use an ETTR approach too: keep overexposing and watching the histogram on the camera until the whites almost, but don't, clip.

[Surly Ghillie]

overexpose by between 1.5~2 stops. under extreme contrast conditions (bright sunlight on clean snow), occasionally by as much as 3 stops. general rule; the less the contrast, the less the over exposure.

[AstraPics]

Every light meter is programmed to render a scene as 18% grey. If you photograph a black cat in a coal cellar, you will end up with a grey cat on grey stones. Similarly, your camera does exactly what it was designed to do with snow - turn it faithfully into a dull 18% grey. You need to think on behalf of your camera and adjust your exposure up or down to compensate for the overall colour or shade in the scene - a couple of stops over (as suggested above) for snow.