Having just returned from a scouting trip for possible tours to Churchill, Manitoba, for polar bears, we had a lot of experience photographing white subjects, and answering questions on How to shoot white from our fellow trip participants. While we did not have snow -- this year, if there is no snow on Halloween Night, October 31st, it will be the first time in living memory that there has not been snow in Churchill on that date! -- we did have a lot of white subjects, including polar bears, arctic fox, willow ptarmigan, snowy owl, and arctic hare. The exposure methodology for shooting all of these animals is the same as we would use for photographing egrets or white pelicans or virtually any other white animal.
The most important point to remember when photographing a white subject is that your meters read for middle tone. A meter does not know whether you're metering a white bird, a gray bird, or a black bird. For the meter, they're all the same, and the meter will provide an exposure that 'zeroes' in all cases, but that would make a white bird gray, a gray bird gray or middle-toned, and a black bird gray. Obviously, that's not right.
While evaluative or matrix metering is effective much of the time, Mary and I use SPOT METERING in MANUAL mode because we have absolute control over the process, and we never need to second-guess or hope that our meters are doing the right thing. We do not bracket, either, as the method we use practically insures that our exposures will be accurate. By the way, we cover virtually everything about metering - thoroughly understanding histograms, metering for black, for white, for all tonalities, are all covered in our Digital Complete Nature Photo Course every summer. My Digital Nature Photography Book, co-authored with my friend Rick Holt, will also address all of these exposure issues in detail. We will be selling the book as a PDF CD by the end of this year. But that's another matter... Let's address metering for white right now.
Again, foremost, you must remember that
metering white makes white gray, or underexposes the whites. After
we spot-meter our white area and zero the exposure, we then purposefully
overexpose that area by about one f-stop. On our histograms, that
is pushing the histogram a bit to the right, but you could overexpose
that area even further, pushing the histogram even further to
the right, provided you don't take the histogram to the edge and
create clipping. Personally, I don't like going to far to the
right and although my histograms are often more 'centered' than
pushed to the right -- which theoretically maximizes the amount
of data in the image capture, I find that the images look more
overexposed and featureless. Technically, my method is the wrong
way, but by doing it this way -- only overexposing by one stop
and letting the histogram sort of settle in the middle or middle-right
of the graph I find I don't need to do very much tweaking in my
RAW converter. And if I do tweak by moving the exposure to the
right, I'm able to more carefully control the sense of 'whiteness'
and overexposure, as opposed to trying to bring back detail on
an image that, in the RAW capture, has a histogram that is already
pushed to the right.
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