A couple of days ago a few inches of snow finally reached us here in Leeds, east of the Penines in the north of England.
It was very misty when I finally went out and I couldn’t help but think of those oft-repeated words to photographers – It’s all about the light.
Well, there wasn’t much light around that afternoon.
This tree is in Soldiers Field in Leeds, a local landmark where local football teams play on a Sunday, and the goalposts were all that could be seen looming out of the mist.
Save for this lone tree.
There are trees along the boundary of the field, but the field itself is an expanse of close-cropped grass save for a very few trees. On this day this lone tree was king or queen of all it surveyed.
Meanwhile, off in the distance, these boys were dragging their sled across the field.
Technical
For this shot of the boys with the sled, I set the exposure compensation to +1.33 to compensate for the black cat at night problem that all cameras face – that is, knowing what they are pointed at.
The question the camera cannot answer is whether the subject is mid-grey or black or white or a mixture of light and dark tones. It’s a question I looked at in this article on digital cameras, though the question applies to film cameras also.
In brief though, the problem is that if a subject is all white and the camera doesn’t know it (which it doesn’t) then it will expose it as though it is a standard scene, which is mid-grey. So to compensate for that and make the subject brighter and whiter, the thing to do is to over expose the shot.
This is done by dialing in a positive amount of exposure compensation – in this case +1.33. Even that wasn’t enough and if I were to shoot in similar circumstances with the Nikon D700 again, I would probably try an exposure compensation of one stop more – say + 2.33.
Luckily, this was shot in RAW, so I could increase the exposure in Adobe Photoshop after the event.