Cold Weather Photography Tips

Today Austin Pittman of Bedford Camera & Video stopped by to share some tips for taking care of your camera and equipment and capturing that perfect snow day picture.

• Avoid drastic temperature changes with your camera. 
• Going from warm to cold or cold to warm will result in condensation
• Don’t put your camera under your jacket between shots, just let it remain cold
• When going from inside to outside or vice versa, leave your camera in your camera bag for an hour if possible before taking it out, this will eliminate condensation.
• You can also put it in a ziplock bag
• Condensation can not only ruin the shots that you were going to shoot that day, but if there is enough it can ruin your camera!
• Keep your batteries warm
• Cold weather will drastically reduce your battery life
• If you keep your extra batteries close to your body, under your coat, it will improve that battery life
• Rotate batteries—when your first battery goes dead, put it under your coat.  As it warms up, it will regain some of it’s charge
• Snow picture tips
• This is one of the times that you really need to get your camera off of automatic mode.
• In auto mode, your snow pictures will be dull and have a gray tint to them.
• In order to get really good snow pictures, you actually need to overexpose your picture by 1 to 2 stops.
• This will turn the snow bright white
• There is a fine line here though, if you over expose too much, you will lost all of your detail.
• This really only works if you are taking landscape type pictures, if you have people or wildlife in the picture too, you run the risk of overexposing them
• Have to decide which is more important, the exposure of your subject, or the whiteness of the snow
• Many point and shoot cameras now have a beach or snow mode that will automatically make these setting changes for you