Photographing white ice

[crockny]

The ice on this little falls was spectacular but came out looking like cotton candy ... I have an Olympus C50 zoom with some manual controls -- I used auto -- it was in the woods so the light was somewhat dim and I used the highest ISO ... any suggestions?

[OsmosisStudios]

Whitebalance. You need to up your yellow in your white balance.

[gh patriot]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

Whitebalance. You need to up your yellow in your white balance.

Yep. yeller.

[PhotoNewt]

Originally Posted by crockny

The ice on this little falls was spectacular but came out looking like cotton candy ... I have an Olympus C50 zoom with some manual controls -- I used auto -- it was in the woods so the light was somewhat dim and I used the highest ISO ... any suggestions?

Try increasing the exposure on you camera by at least 1-stop when taking photos of very reflective subjects such as snow or sand.

The reflected light meter on most cameras is designed to provide an adequate exposure of a subject with an average reflectance of approximately 18%. When the scene contains a large portion that reflects more than this amount (such as the white ice in your case) it causes the meter to incorrectly decrease the exposure so it renders the scene dark with greyish looking whites.

To compensate for this flaw on your metering system, you need to manually dial in an additional 1-2 stops of exposure so the ice actually comes white on the final image. To "warm up" the image a little so the color cast is not so blue, you can change the white balance setting from daylight to cloudy on your camera as well.

While true that some of these adjustments can be achieved by post processing, is better to produce a better exposed and balanced image from your camera to minimize the need for post adjustments.

Hope this helps.

[crockny]

Thanks -- that's helpful -- I was about to ask about the yellow thing because I only have four choices - sunny cloudy tungsten and fluorescent (if I remember correctly)!

[kirbinster]

No those are presets for white balance, what they were talking about is actually change the temperature in Kelvin and the color hue.

[crockny]

I guess you are talking about fixing what I already shot in Photoshop? Yes, I could try changing the color hue in Photoshop ... rather do it right in the first place though!