Shooting In The Snow At 200mm with Joshua Hohweiler

It’s not very often that we get snow here in Texas, but as soon as we saw it coming down we threw on our heavy clothes and headed outside.  Our little man still wasn’t quite sure what snow was, and it was an experience for him that I definitely wanted to capture.  Sometimes it’s hard to find the balance between capturing the moment or putting the camera down and just sharing in the fun, but his elation over the snow was just too wonderful not to have lasting tangible memories of it.

To keep the snow off my gear, I balanced an umbrella on my shoulder while I shot.  Did I look ridiculous?  Yes.  Did the neighbors probably get a good laugh at my front yard antics?  Most likely.  And, should I have remembered to have my wife take a picture of me taking pictures of my son so that you could all see my crazy setup?  Absolutely!  Oh well, next time, next time…. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to keep the snow off of your camera.

It wasn’t snowing very hard, but shooting at 200mm allowed me create the illusion that it was.  This is because there was more distance between my lens and my subject, which means more snowflakes in my line of sight.

As I was snapping photos of him playing, I wanted to ensure the snowflakes didn’t contain any motion blur.  I always shoot in manual, and I typically set my aperture first.  In this shot, once I set the aperture to f/2.0, I set my shutter speed to 1/1000s to avoid motion blur from his hands and feet.  This also allowed me to effectively freeze the snowflakes in place.  Then, I raised my ISO to 500 to achieve the correct in-camera exposure.  I’ve listed my gear and settings below:

This image was edited with actions from the Innocence Collection: Emotional Color Base then added Paddington @ 40% opacity (added rich contrast and turned the greens from warm to cool) and Polar Express @ 20% opacity (enhanced the temperature and added a clean fresh tone).

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