I am a winter photographer, and even in summer I go to places like Iceland, LOL. You need a film that shoots clean whites. The best I found was Kodak E100G.
I'm extremely biased regarding films, but that bias is based on long experience!
Fuji's Provia 100F handles snow scenes with style: clear blues, crisp whites and natural colour. At the other extreme, if you want colours from Vaudeville, angle for Velvia 50 (rated at EI40); you may wish to experiment with either/both, but generally Velvia will have the better "WOW"! factor, particularly early morning to evening snow scenes. If your camera has evaluative metering, it should nail the snow scene without trouble, otherwise 1.5 stops in bright sun added to baseline exposure. Remember that print films have much wider latitude (or "play") than the transparency films commonly available. Velvia is very unforgiving of gross exposure errors.
If your camera has evaluative metering, it should nail the snow scene without trouble, otherwise 1.5 stops in bright sun added to baseline exposure.
So I guess, you're talking about reflective metering here, adding 1.5 stops. Is incident metering a bad idea when shooting bright sunlighted snow landscapes? Does it give too much over exposure to the snow?
I rarely use color and snow doesn't happen down here but I would consider some bracketing especially with slides. Your shutter speeds may not be exactly what the dial says and just trying a new film might take some getting used to. Taking an 18% gray card might help with your metering. Bright sun and snow may require more than 1.5 stops with any film.
Incident light metering is the way to go to minimize risks of overexposure. You can subtract some 0.5 EV from the incident meter reading in order to have more of your scene further from the film's toe. Said in another way, your snow will be greyer, but with more overtones and undertones, and as your mind knows that the snow is white, you'll appreciate the greater texture while not bothering with the "un-whiteness" of the snow.
Be wary of scenes where you have half the snow in shade and half in full sunlight. The part in shade will have a blue cast if the sky is blue. If the sky is blue, and the scene is entirely in the shade, you will have the blue cast all over, which means it is easy to correct either during capture (with an amber* filter) or after capture if you print or scan.
Fabrizio
* EDIT It goes without saying I mean one of those light amber filters sold as "skylight" filters.
Last edited by Diapositivo; 10-31-2011 at 02:34 PM.
Obviously the biggest issue is metering. You need to be sure not to underexpose or you won't get crisp whites.... with any film.
Provia 100F, for my taste, blues up too easily. Watch out for that, especially at high altitude. There are warming filters specifically for this problem; I forget the number but I have one.
My choices would be velvia 100 and astia, and provia 400x if you need higher speed.
Amog the print films I would say reala, but it is no more Unfortunately the 160 films fight so hard to prevent whiteouts that you lose a lot of that slide-like pop. Maybe ektar would work but if you can get your hands on some reala....
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Originally Posted by Poisson Du Jour
Unfortunately the 160 films fight so hard to prevent whiteouts that you lose a lot of that slide-like pop. Maybe ektar would work but if you can get your hands on some reala....
