White on white

One of my favorite winter shots is this cottonwood tree I photographed in Montana. The white on white theme makes winter photography special. Exposing for a scene with no middle gray tonality is a bit tricky. There are three ways to do it: 1) Use a handheld incident meter. This kind of meter reads the light falling on the scene, not the light being reflected from. This will produce a perfect exposure. 2) Take a picture of the scene, study the LCD monitor on the back of your camera, and then tweak the result using the exposure compensation feature until the next image, or the one after that, is correct. 3) Take the shot with no exposure compensation and let the RAW files go somewhat dark. They will be underexposed because the built-in reflected meter is programmed to understand middle tones. With snow, it assumes the whiteness is middle gray and therefore produces an exposure to show that it is, in fact, gray, which means the picture will be dark. Then, in post processing, make the adjustments in ACR or LR using the exposure and highlight sliders. The underexposure is not that severe as to increase noise substantially.