1 Get in position
Whether you’re shooting climbing, skiing or even a snowball fight,
you need to find the best backdrop for the action, so explore the
location until you find the best vantage point, and then experiment
with the angle and focal length until you’re happy with the framing.
2 Stay sharp
Use shutter-priority mode, and make sure your shutter speed is fast
enough to capture sharp shots of your activity. A speed of 1/160 sec
should be fast enough for walking and climbing, but you will need a
shutter speed of 1/1000 sec or faster for very fast sports like skiing.STEP BY STEP / Snow business
WATCH
THE VIDEO The trick is to override your camera’s
metering system, to brighten the image up
Watch the video online at bit.ly/NPhoto56 March 2016 43
A
ction portraits are always
challenging to take, as
you’re faced with fast,
erratic movement and,
often, difficult conditions too.
In winter, the snow can create
added complications. You can’t
rely on your camera to get the
exposure right, as the abundance
of white can confuse its metering
system. In essence, your camera
expects the bulk of the image to
be a midtone, and will therefore
try to render the snow as grey.
As we’ll explain, the trick is to
override your camera’s metering
system, to brighten the image up,
and ensure the snow looks white,
not grey. This has the added
advantage of brightening up your
subject, so they don’ t look
‘silhouetted’ against the snow.We’ll also explain how to gauge
how much to brighten your image
up, depending on the weather and
lighting conditions, and also how
to double-check that you’ve
exposed the snow and your
subject correctly.
For our shoot, we headed up
onto the Aonach Eagach ridge
in Glencoe, in the Highlands of
Scotland, to shoot mountaineer
Alex – though the fundamental
technique will be the same
regardless of what winter
sport you’re shooting.
For out-and-out action images,
the obvious temptation is to crop
in tight on your subject using a
long lens, but in very dramatic
locations like this, it’s usually
a good idea to try to capture the
drama of the location, and a sense
of your subject making a journey
through the landscape. With this
in mind, we opted for a 24-85mm
kit lens, to enable us to fit in more
of the surrounding landscape.
Here’s how we got on...The mission
O To c a p tu re we ll -
exposed images
of winter sports like
climbing and skiing
Time
O One hour
Skill level
O Beginner
O Intermediate
O Advanced
Kit needed
O D-SLRPROJECT ONE / CAMERA TECHNIQUES
Freeze the action
To m Welsh heads out into the snow-clad Highlands of Scotland to
show you how to overcome the challenges of shooting winter sportsWINTER SPORTS