Winter Assignment...

Our next assignment is a vague one, your task is to shoot winter images. You will have this week as well as break to do so. What represents winter to you? activities? holidays? traditions? places? people? events? Think about how you can represent these on film in an interesting way. You will be shooting 24 images of "winter". These shots should be made up of at least 3 different ideas, concepts or themes. (i.e. holiday lights, snowscapes, & cookies... whatever winter means to you).

Some tips for shooting this time of year:

The angle of the sun on the horizon is smaller during wintertime, creating numerous pleasing effects for photographers, such as a prolonged period of the magic hour.

We refer to the magic hour as the time around sunrise or sunset, when most of the light is reflected and the direct light of the sun passes through a lot more atmosphere, thus filtering out the harsh neutral or blue cast.

Throughout the entire day, the sun will never reach a high zenith, always illuminating our subjects at a much more pleasing angle. Summer sun often causes extreme shadows and contrast and the lighting shifts more towards blue tones.

Due to the low angle of the sun, textures will look three-dimensional and become alive and shadows will be long and deep. We can use shadows to support our main subject, to hint at the presence of a subject by only showing its shadow or to create a sense of scale by comparing shadows. Shadows are copies of our subjects with different qualities that can greatly enhance our composition.


Weather

Most of the summer all you get is a flat blue sky. Come winter, things change. Suddenly the sky gets interesting. Finally, the setting sun has the reflector it needs to create sunsets we only see get during the winter months. The clouds reflect the sunlight and because it now travels thousands of miles through the atmosphere, its deep red light will illuminate the clouds and the landscape creating unique “scapes” that only photographers know exist and many attribute to the wonders of digital image manipulation.

Winter has many other beneficial weather patterns to offer. Nothing is as exciting as photographing a virgin snowscape in the first light of the day. When a white veil of beauty covers all the unsightly spots and the frost glistens from the trees reflecting the first rays, you know that only winter can provide such beauty.


Tips and Challenges

Here are some technical tips for those of you who need no further convincing that winter time is the prime photography season.

Cameras tend to underexpose white and overexpose black as they gravitate toward neutral grey. You need to overexpose snowscapes by up to 2 stops. If you are shooting sunrises, you will not have much time to figure things out as the light changes quickly, so it is good to know this.