White on white

One of my favorite color themes in nature is white on white. These are Japanese cranes I photographed on the island of Hokkaido in Japan during their courtship ritual. Fortunately the sky was overcast; otherwise the contrast would have been too much for the digital sensor to handle. I used a 500mm f/4 Canon telephoto, and my settings were 1/2000, f/11, and 800 ISO. The challenge, of course, was exposure. The snow was so bright that the meter, designed to understand 'middle gray', would underexposure the scene in an attempt to make everything middle gray. With film, we had to make an educated guess as to how much we should overexpose the shot which would then counter the inherent underexposure. But with the immediate feedback of the liquid crystal display on the back of our cameras, it's a simple matter to use the exposure compensation feature to tweak the images until the results are perfect.