Photographing Birds In Snow

The snow arrived here in the UK yesterday and since this means our birds have to work even harder to find food it was a great opportunity for me to photograph some in my garden. I put some extra feed out and waited, and soon enough down they came, and with the snow and the sunlight it made for very interesting bird photography. Here are some of my favourite shots including a Dunnock, male Chaffinch and Starling.

I was finding that each shot needed to be overexposed by about 1 or 2 stops simply because the snow is so bright and reflects so much light that the camera is fooled into thinking there is more light than there actually is. Shooting using the camera's meter reading underexposes a snow scene and makes for very grey murky images, and there is also the white balance to consider too. Automatic white balance is usually pretty good but on the day I was shooting the sky was clear and blue which results in the snow appearing very blue, therefore I tried the cloudy setting which was better but found that I needed to set a custom white balance using the white of the snow as a reference.