Hi Dave, I regularly shoot on ski slopes and I found that there are
two situations when I just can't bring both snow and subject in the
latitude range of the slide film, no matter what. One is with
overcast sky / foggy days: due to lack of directional lighting snow
looses any detail with compensations > +1 EV and the subject appear
as suspended in air. An external flash helps a lot to fill-in the
main subject but who carries that anyway when on skis...? [I once
backpacked one but mounting/using it on a cold day was really a
pain]. The other is with skiers in backlight. While this usually
provides the most spectacular shots you really have to decide if you
can settle for silhouette pictures, where angle and sense of speed
are more important than details on the skier.
Recently I have found I can recover amazing detail from both
overexposed/underexposed areas by scanning Provia 100F in 16bit
linear color space so I'm really looking forward for more ski
photography (hopefully as soon as tomorrow... :o) ).
Servus, Alin
Dave wrote:
bcin> A co worker is heading for a ski vacation in Europe this weekend
bcin> and has a bunch of Velvia and Provia 400F. We were talking about
bcin> metering for bright snow,which methods,hand held,gray cards,back
bcin> of hand etc.One i thought of,and his camera can do it is work
bcin> with EV. He seems to want to shoot in a program mode of some
bcin> sort and I dont use EV at all,but i said i would check this for
bcin> him. If he uses the program mode and its bright snowy day,his
bcin> camera will try to undewrexpose the snow.I suggested using+1.5
bcin> or +1.7 EV and that should help.
bcin> Did i send him the right way.?
bcin> Myself i would do it manually with a hand held reading,but, you know kids these
days. :-)
