The current deepfreeze has turned many of our windows into works of art. I’ve photographed frost in the past, without a good result.
Any tips on how best to do it?
IANAPro Photographer but most frost photos I’ve seen seem to be;
Taken from the inside
The room is dark
Plenty of light from outside coming through the frost.
No flash is used.
What type of camera are you trying to use?
I agree that the light should come from outside.
It might be worthwhile to experiment with light coming from different angles so that you get some contrast through the crystals. Either try the photo at different times of day (dawn vs. noon) or wait until night and use an artificial light. Or a combination: dawn light plus an artificial light. Just a thought.
In addition to making certain only ambient outside light is used to backlight its delicate structure, you want to make sure the frost on the window commands the viewer’s attention. You do this by making certain it’s the only thing in focus – not the lawn, not the trees, not the house across the street, etc. What you’re trying to create is a crystal-clear shot of the subject (get it? Crystal? Hah!) with the background reduced to a unidentifiable smudge of color.
The key here is depth of field, and you want your depth to be as shallow as possible – only a scant few centimeters if you can pull it off. There are two things you need to do to achieve this (I’m assuming you’re using a manual camera – or at least one that lets you make some manual adjustments):
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Open your aperture as wide as it’ll go. A wide aperture = shallow depth of field.
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Get close to the subject (the frost in this case). Get real close. A short camera-to-subject distance also narrows the depth of field. You’ll have to find the minimum focal distance of your lens – that is, the point at which your lens cannot properly focus on an object any closer – and make sure you don’t exceed it; otherwise everything is gonna be blurry.
I can’t link directly to it because it’s a Macromedia slide show, but go to http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3251645/ and click on “The Week in Pictures.” The first photo is a good example of what you’re probably going for (follow the link quickly; I believe the week in pictures refreshes on Friday, and it doesn’t look like MSNBC allows access to its archives any longer).
As already mentioned, the key to a good frost photo is good lighting (you generally want frost backlit for a good effect). Hell, the key to any good photo is good lighting (generally). But outside of that, the other thing to look out for is your exposure. Since frost is mostly white, it’ll fool your camera into underexposing. Cameras have no idea what they’re looking at and average to 18% gray. (Which is generally regarded as an even balance between dark and light tones). If your frame contains mostly white, your camera still thinks it’s looking at a neutral gray and will meter itself thusly. A good rule of thumb is to open up the aperture by one to two stops (err on the side of two stops) when taking pictures of snow or anything with a lot of white in the frame. You could also double or quadruple the exposure time for the same result.
One more, a macro lens (which allows you to focus very close) would also help in such a situation. And a tripod.
A thing to do is to bracket the exposure time or aperture. That is, take one photo two stops above, one at one stop above, one right on top, and one under.
Well, yeah, but if you’re taking a picture of something that’s predominantly white, there’s no point in bracketing under, because if you’re relying on your light meter without compensating for the fact that your frame is mostly white, your neg will be underexposed anyway. Why underexpose more? If you’re gonna bracket, bracket smart.