Winter Photography by Cwmbran Photographers
This time of year Kapow are relatively quiet with the wedding photography in Cwmbran and thankfully none of our customer’s big days were affected by the bad weather.
Taking advantage of a quiet week I decided to grab the camera and go out and photograph some winter scenes. The first attempt involved driving down to Newport and taking a walk round the Celtic Manor Golf Club. Though before I could get to the Celtic Manor I stumbled across a derelict farm house and decided to take some photographs here.
The snow had stopped and there was bright sunlight so the conditions couldn’t have been better. I walked around the farmhouse trying to get the best angle for a photo.
The main thing to remember when taking photographs in the snow is that the camera’s metering system will be fooled by the bright snow. You have probably seen snapshots on Facebook of people building snowmen or sledding where the snow appears grey and dark. This is because the camera will expose the scene not knowing that the snow is meant to be white and it will underexpose the shot.
The way to combat this is to dial in a couple of stops of exposure compensation on the camera. This will ensure that the scene is bright and the snow is correctly shown as white.
The same problem occurs during wedding photography. When you try to photograph a bride’s dress during a wedding this can sometimes fool the camera and it will underexpose the shot.
The next trip out in the snow with the camera was with a friend of mine Luciano from Cwmbran. He has just bought himself a new DSLR and is keen to learn as much as he can about all aspects of photography, including learning the ropes with wedding photography.
We stopped at St Mary’s church in Pontypool and set the camera up on a tripod because it was quite dark to avoid camera shake. Using some very long exposures (4-5 minutes) we were able to get some great photos of the church in the snow.
I was quite happy with both sets of photos but I think they looked even better after a quick black and white conversion. This really brings out the contrast between the snow and the surroundings and using a few curve adjustments in photoshop it accentuated it even more.
Hopefully the snow will melt this week and I can resume my day job as a South Wales wedding photographer
