Shooting in the mountains

[StreetDoc]

After 10 years of snowboarding the midwest I'm finally making it out to REAL mountains. I'll be at Vail and Keystone next week, I'm bringing my camera along in hopes of getting some decent shots. Any tips for shooting in beautiful snow covered mountains with a bright blue sky?

[rylan]

all i can say is make sure they dont get over exposed but i guess if your decent with PS u can fix that easily. have fun!!

[greghalliday]

There are two very useful tips I have received in the past for shooting in snow. Number one: use incident metering for best results. Two ways I have done this. Use your in camera meter to read off the back of your ungloved hand and transfer those settings to the actual image. Of get a small 18% gray card and do the same. Reflective metering in a snow filled white environment rarely turns out great. One exception I have found to this is in the trees. The dark of the trunks and needles, tend to balance out the snow and you get fine results without too much trouble. The other way is just to over expose by a stop or so. This is less accurate and was more of a gamble in the film days, but with PS you can compensate quite easily. Also, shoot in RAW mode if you can.

I hope Photo-John chimes in on this one. His ski and winter mountain images are absolutely spot on. So if he does comment ignore me and go with him.

[greghalliday]

Oh, and number three. You need to pray hard and maybe even offer sacrifices if you want perfect bluebird days in the Rockies. Those are always the surfer's lament "You should have been here yesterday."

[greghalliday]

Oh, and number four: if you're close to the subject, using fill flash can help to darken the sky some.

[JTcooper]

the best is to bring with you a tripot and take about three more shot, 1 expose for the fg, 2 the moutain, 3 the sky and come back in ps used blend mode to merge each layer would be easer that what I would thinks.

good luck and have fun shooting,

[freygr]

I would say use a polarizer filter. This will help getting the blue sky you are hopping for and also you can us it to kill reflections.

[StreetDoc]

thanks for the tips, I will have my polarizer and tripod. I haven't played with metering in a while (somewhat newbie still) but I'll definitely play with it! 3 days and counting