5 Tips for Taking Splendid Snowy Photos

The UK may be equally worried about torrential rain and the cold snap, but let’s say for arguments’ sake a few weeks of winter wonderland style snowfall are on their way. Think more along the lines of Raymond Briggs ‘The Snowman’ than the grey slush of commuter nightmares!

1.    Don’t rely on the auto-setting!
For reasons that shall remain known only to the Snow Queen herself, winter hates the auto-setting on your camera. The snow will do everything in its power to make your images exceptionally dark or glaringly bright (somehow both of these show little to no definition concerning your subject, making that snowman or your joyfully frolicking dog appear as nothing more than a shadowy smear or bright smudge!)

2.    Learn to set your own white balance to avoid blue snow!
The white balance setting basically tells the camera how white the white of each image should be. In the face of a gorgeous snowy scene, most cameras will overcompensate for all the white by making the images too blue. To select the right white balance, you can usually look under the format settings of the camera and select “Daylight” or some variation on “Snow”. This will lock the white balance to minimise blue tones and keep the brilliant white of the snow nice and true. (It’s also a great way to make sunsets pop super red!)

3.    Argh! Dark Pictures!
The dark is exactly what you want when you’re trying out your new night vision binoculars or one of our latest astronomical telescopes, but on a festive afternoon taking photos of the icing on your garden, you don’t want dark photos!
The light meters on most cameras automatically average around 18% grey. But with so much white in the frame, your camera is tricked into making the image much darker than necessary. Manually increasing the exposure value or selecting a specialist setting (e.g. ‘Snow Scene’ or ‘Snowy Landscape’) means you can brighten up white-heavy shots.

4.    Get up early
You may have been up all night with your astronomy telescopes, but if you can soldier on until dawn you’ll see fresh snowfall at its most photogenic. The sunlight is softer, colours more vivid and the snow less trodden. The long shadows of dawn and soft light of the sunrise minimise the risk of blue tones (which become more of an issue closer to midday)

5.    Avoid the snow!
There are plenty of colours in a snow-filled landscape – frost on a rich brown pinecone, fresh snowfall on a red letter box, etc – so consider avoiding the issues of snowy photography by focussing on colourful objects. A great tip is to use the fill flash of your camera to help the automatic metering be a little more accurate.
A huge part of successful winter photography is about trial and error. It can be a great idea to avoid auto settings entirely and really get a feel for how your camera works (and few conditions present more of a challenge than snow!)

Could You Head for the Stars?

It’s a cruel fact of the life of the astronomer and those in related disciplines that there’s more chance of being struck by lightning than of actually becoming an astronaut and travelling even remotely close to the stars and celestial marvels studied in the skies above.

But setting aside those little reveries when you gaze up at the night sky coming over all emotional and star struck, what does it really take to be a space man? A 2012 poll on LinkedIn ranked astronaut at no.5 on a list of dream jobs. So, should you have applied?

For one, most astronaut bios read like Tony Stark’s education and achievements! They almost always begin with a childhood obsession with all things celestial – watching the 1969 moon mission launch through their binoculars from their parents’ yard, decorating their bedroom ceiling with the constellations as seen through their astronomical telescopes, etc.

Canadian Astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, is a space newbie at age 36, having only joined the space programme in 2009 after a career flying fighter jets. He says there is no perfect recipe for what makes an astronaut, but nerves of steel and ‘operational skills’ are a must.

“You have to be able to learn, but you don’t have to be the smartest person in the world. We need to know that if we put you in a bad situation, you can handle the stress and pressure of it, and not freak out when things get tough. I flew fighter pilots but there are so many ways to get experience like that.”

Most astronauts have a speciality – communications, mechanical engineering, astrophysicist, biologist, etc. There are three typical categories that each astronaut falls into – payload specialist, mission specialist and pilot/commander.

Payload specialists are responsible for a highly tailored element of a mission. They’re often found outside typical astronaut channels, and are usually specialists in a field who are then trained for space travel in order to use their specialist skills in space. For example, Charles D.Walker was an American engineer who trained as an astronaut specifically to fly on three space missions in the late 1980s (he’d actually failed to gain entry to the ’78 astronaut school, so there’s always hope!)

The difference between a mission specialist and a payload specialist is that mission specialists are trained primarily as astronauts and secondly assigned a small field of operation on each mission. Most of the astronauts living on the International Space Station are mission specialists.

The commander/pilot is in charge of the mission. Depending on the size of the mission, there are numerous ranks and positions to be filled, e.g. pilot, command pilot, docking module pilot, etc. Pilots and commanders are responsible for the success of the mission and safety of the crew rather than a specific task like a payload specialist.

And here’s some great news for budding astronauts; as humankind looks to the stars and the first non-government space programmes quite literally get off the ground, the job prospects for those wanting a genuinely celestial career on the space end of their telescopes are only going to improve!