Winter offers opportunities for beautiful scenery and backdrops for photographic adventures. Winter conditions also present a couple of challenges to keep in mind when venturing out for a day of photography in the snow: Temperature and Light.

Temperature
Cold temperatures cause batteries to drain more quickly than we might be accustom. Spare batteries will allow prolonged shooting sessions. By keeping the spares warm will assure maximum capacity when they are required. Keeping them in a pocket close to the body.  In some cases it will help to rotate batteries periodically to allow them to recover in a warm place.

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Another consideration on cold days will prevent moisture from condensing on and inside of your camera. When you return from your chilly day out, protect your camera in a protective bag before going into a warm room. Allowing the camera to warm up for an hour or so before using it in the warm building will prevent moisture from entering camera components.

Light

The bright white snow that makes scenery so beautiful can also spoil photographs, by making the subject look too dark. Camera exposure systems, and light meters “see” the bright snow as medium gray. Light readings directly from snowy scenes would result in underexposing the scene. Compensating for this potential exposure error simply requires a wider lens opening or slower shutter speed. Manual cameras can be set to the wider opening of between 1 and 2 f-stops. This range usually suffices. Most automatic cameras have an exposure compensation feature +/- that can be set to accomplish a similar result. Refer to your user's guide to see if your particular model has this setting, and where to find it. Look for this symbol , and set the exposure compensation lower, to counter the extremely bright light that can reflect off of the snow.