Off skiing tomorrow with my new digital camera (FujiFilm F700 zoom).
Any tips on getting good photos? Eg I’ve heard that the white balance benefits from some adjustment owing to the high levels of UV in the Alps. Not too sure how to do this though.
Any tips grattfully received - If there any good I may post some on the web if people are interested.
Best I can offer is do a little trial and error. I would imagine on top of a snowy mountain it will be pretty bright, so keep those exposure times fast.
Well, the good news is you have a digital camera. That way you can use my method of photography.
Take lots of pictures. Take lots and lots and lots and lots of pictures. Click away like a madman. And maybe, just maybe, one or two may turn out OK. Good luck, and have fun!
Plus, lots of things can be fixed with a halfway decent photo editor. If you under or ever-expose a shot you may be able to correct it with the software that came with the camera or any number of photo editing pieces that are out there.
Get a large memory card and take a million shots. 
In addition, your camera probably has settings for high light levels, and such. If you put the camera in manual mode you should be able to modify the settings pretty easily. Also, lots of cameras have simple settings in the auto mode that adjust for high/low/different light levels without you having to know exactly what the settings should be. Mine has auto settings for outdoor, far away shots, indoor, flourescent lighting, incandescent lighting, action, backlight, etc.
Take a brief tour through the manual that came with the camera for more details.
Not sure about the UV, although you could check and see if the camera takes filters. If so, use a UV filter.
One tip for snow-related photography is that cameras try to record images as an average shade of gray. For scenes that are not average, such as snow scapes, the camera may end up underexposing the shot. So in order to get snow that is actually white, you may want to manually increase the exposure by an f-stop or so.
That’s correct. Your white balance will be thrown off that high in the mountains.
Looking through the specs, it looks like your camera actually has a custom white balance mode (!!!). That’ll help a lot. I don’t know that particular Fuji model, but what you’ll want to do is follow the instructions in the manual for manually setting white balance. It will involve pointing your camera at a neutral white or gray card and setting the white balance off this. Take the white balance reading in the same lighting conditions your subject is in. For example, if your subject is in the shade, take the white balance reading with the card in the shade. If your subject is in the sun, take the reading with the card in the sun.
If you don’t want to mess around with custom white-balancing, it will help to set your white balance to the overcast setting, but this will only very slightly improve the photo. At any rate, once you get pretty high up, your pictures will get more and more blue because of the way light scatters in the atmosphere. If you want the best possible pictures, use custom white balancing. If you don’t, you still can color correct in Photoshop, but it’s easier and looks much better if you do it in-camera.
Other than that, your camera’s light meter will certainly be fooled by the snow. Use your preview screen to check the exposures on your photos (if you know how to read histograms and your camera has a view histogram option, use that.) You will usually need to adjust your camera’s auto exposure by as much as two stops (+2 EV) if you have a lot of snow in your frame. Once again, you can fix some of this in Photoshop, but being off by two stops in your exposure will seriously hamper your efforts in salvaging the pic.
Other than that, just take lots and lots of photos.
If you gave 100 monkeys 100 digital cameras and an infinet ammount of time, one them would take this picutre.
I’m not calling anyone a monkey.
But fire away and finish the photo in Photoshop seems to be the way of digital cameras.
No. No straight print from a digital camera would ever look like that.
No more so than fire away and dodge-and-burn and adjust the color balance with filters is the way of the wet darkroom.
Next?
Sorry for the little snark, but I detected a little backinthegoodoldaysism in your post. Anyhow, I started work in the wet darkroom and have mostly been raised in the film era. The same basic rules still apply in digital photography. You want to get the best possible image in-camera before you go screwing around with it. Most of the changes us photographers are doing in Photoshop are the same changes we’d be doing in the darkroom, and to create the most efficient workflow with superior results, you want to start with a perfect digital file, just like in film photography your aim is the perfect neg.
That seems unnecessarily snobbish. One could certainly argue that for the amateur photographer, you get much more control over the photo than you would from a photofinisher. And only a very small percentage of the population has ever stepped into a darkroom and wet-processed a print and then burned and dodged it to perfection.
However, it is true that you have to get the exposure close in a digital photo because you don’t have the dynamic range of film (and even film isn’t that great). So if something is overexposed out of existence in the picture, nothing you can do in photoshop will bring it back.
However, given the low (essentially zero) cost of taking a digital photo, “fire away in an intelligent fashion” is not a bad philosophy. As long as you’re bracketing your exposures and framing your pictures reasonably, why not fire away and then sort 'em all out back in the comfort of your living room?
To add to Finagle’s point. Let’s go back to the film days. Did you know, on average, a National Geographic assignment took 500—1000 rolls of films (that’s up to 36,000 frames) for a 4-6 week assignment?
I didn’t mean to sound snobbish about digital photographers.
I think the digital camera revolution goes hand in hand with the availbiltiy of desktop imaging software. I think that more people today are doing ‘post production’ work on their images than ever before. Well maybe not the early days of photography when every photographer developed their own stuff. I don’t have my own darkroom now and I don’t see myself setting one up anytime soon.
I just hate those HP commercials. The guy sitting at his desk pulling up picture frames and then setting down photos of himself over and over and never even looking at the photos he makes but just takes another picture and another and another, well, it just really bugs me for some reason.
Back to the OP.
I’ve looked on line at your camera and some reviews and it looks like you got a pretty good camera. However some of the reviews said that daylight exposures tended to be a little underexposed. But your camera does allow you to change the shutter speed or the aperture and you can compensate for that. If that sounds daunting to you, your camera also has a feature called exposure bracketing. If you don’t know what that is, read on. When you take a photo with your camera the camera decides what would be the best exposure setting. You help with the 'Daylight, Nighttime, Scenic, ect." setting. If you use the bracketing, your camera will take three pictures. One with the exposure it thinks is best and then one that is a little more exposed and one with a little less exposure. Then you can pick from all three different exposures without having to change the shutter speed or the f-stop yourself.
Thanks for the help guys. Looks like a bit of RTFM could be in order to check out the white balancing function, plus exposure bracketing.
A common feature is a SUN/SNOW auto exposure setting used to compensate for the extreme contrast you get in, well, sun and snow settings. (In my Nikon cameras it’s a half-snowman half sun icon.)
Problem with setting a custom white balance is that you’ve gotta RE set it when the conditions change. Take a pic of someone in full sunlight and forget to reset it when taking a pic of them in the shade and one or the other won’t turn out.
You batteries will last longer if you turn off the preview screen.
(and between you and me, photographers are really thick skinned peoples…wander through photo.net if you don’t believe me. )