7 tips for snow photos
Saturday 3 January 2026, 15:30 by Elja Trum | 33,278 views | 11 commentsThis article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.
A wintery world gives you an easy way to take photos you don't get to make every day. Here are seven tips for taking beautiful snow photos over the coming days.
1. Overexpose
A beautiful blanket of white snow will fool your camera's light meter. It won't take the correct reading in these conditions. This often gives you dull, dark photos on a winter's day.
You can easily compensate for this with the exposure compensation on your camera. Set it to +1 to create one stop of overexposure. Use the histogram on your camera to check that you aren't overexposing (or still underexposing). With overexposure, you lose the details in the light areas and
You can still correct things quite well afterwards in Lightroom or another editing programme when you shoot in RAW. You can't recover genuinely overexposed areas this way.
2. White balance
Your camera also often struggles when choosing the white balance for snow photos. The automatic white balance often gives you bluish photos, especially in the shade. When you work in RAW, you can correct this afterwards without any problems (and you can get quite far with Jpeg too), but of course it's even better to choose a white balance setting manually to prevent the blue cast.
3. Get the timing right
Snow looks best when nobody has walked or driven through it yet. So head out early in the morning or look for places where few people go. Also be careful where you walk yourself, before you know it you'll have created the footprints in a potentially beautiful photo!
4. Watch the weather
Keep an eye on the weather forecast too. Not just for when it's going to snow, but especially for when it clears up. Tomorrow will probably be a mostly cloudy day. Saturday morning might therefore be a better time to head out. Clear spells are also expected that day.
You can take the most beautiful snow photos when it has snowed at night and the weather is beautifully (almost) clear in the morning. In the first morning light, the world is truly beautiful.
5. Look for details
A vast snowy landscape is certainly beautiful, but you can also take beautiful snow photos when you don't go far from home. Look for smaller details, such as a twig with snow on it. Combined with a beautiful (blurred) background, you can take beautiful snow photos almost anywhere.
6. Dress warmly
When you head out to take snow photos, it's a good idea to dress properly. A warm coat, scarf and good waterproof shoes are recommended. I prefer to use thinner gloves as well, so you can still operate the camera properly.
Good waterproof trousers or ski trousers keep your legs warm, and also make it easy to sit in the snow to take photos from a low angle. If you're going out for a long time, take a thermos of hot tea with you to warm up with.
Also think about your camera. Snow is ultimately just water, so you need to protect your camera from it. When you go back inside after taking your photos, leave your camera in your camera bag for a while. This lets the camera and your lenses gradually warm up and prevents condensation in places you can't reach.
7. Snow in black and white
Especially on a cloudy day, you soon miss colour in a snow photo. That certainly doesn't mean you shouldn't go out on a cloudy day. A snow photo without colour can work very well too. Try converting a low-colour snow photo to black and white. This puts more emphasis on the structures and shapes.
Een eerdere versie van dit artikel is verschenen op donderdag 6 december 2012, 23:57.
About the author
Elja Trum is the founder of Photofacts and online photography course website Photofacts Academy. He has been writing about photography since 2006. Elja is also the author of (Dutch) books on composition, black-and-white photography, flash photography and portrait photography.
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11 comments
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wim hoppenbrouwers wrote on Friday 7 December 2012 at 12:01 | replythanks for these tips.
Translated from Dutch.
wim -
Alain wrote on Friday 7 December 2012 at 12:17 | replyone more practical tip: the battery lasts less long in this weather, don't keep a spare battery in your backpack or bag, but close to your body, the warmer, the more capacity!
Translated from Dutch. -
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ink wrote on Tuesday 11 December 2012 at 11:49 | replywhich setting do you use for your white balance then?
Translated from Dutch. -
corine wrote on Tuesday 11 December 2012 at 20:28 | replythanks for the tips, they'll surely come in handy this winter.
Translated from Dutch.
i'm also curious about the answer to the question about the white balance setting -
ErikvanRosmalen
wrote on Tuesday 11 December 2012 at 21:13
| reply
Snow photos naturally always have a slightly bluish tint. If you set your white balance to a Kelvin value, you can still correct it later in Lightroom, and then use the same value for all your photos. I would use a white balance of, for example, 5600K. Slightly on the warm side, but that also compensates for the blue cast. Although you don't want to get rid of it completely either, since that also looks unnatural. In short, shoot in Raw, so you can always adjust your WB afterwards!
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Kiezel wrote on Tuesday 11 December 2012 at 21:16 | replyFor the white balance I use a semi-transparent lens cap with a white piece of plastic in it. With that I create a custom white balance. Or a photo of a gray card in my white landscape. Then I can still correct the color afterwards.
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Robbie Fotografie wrote on Wednesday 12 December 2012 at 22:03 | replythere are some nice tips in there, only I don't really like that thermos flask, it'll crack from the frost....get one with a stainless steel interior....now wait again for a nice layer of snow and indeed, Saturday morning was beautiful with a snow mist just above the ground over the fields....
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eduardvanmil
wrote on Thursday 10 January 2013 at 17:53
| reply
Great tips now that winter is returning a month after this article.
Translated from Dutch.
I wonder if HDR is also a solution for underexposure, with a polarizer of course but possibly also with an ND filter?
Does anyone have experience with that, e.g. on a 5D MK III?
Also enjoy taking lots of photos in the coming weeks, it looks like we've said goodbye to that gray card!
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guest wrote on Tuesday 6 January 2026 at 12:47 | reply
White balance on shade works perfectly fine for me
Translated from Dutch.
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Would you like to take better photos and keep up with what is happening in photography? Photofacts publishes articles that teach you something about photography — from a product announcement to a practical shooting tip or a look at a website. Photofacts covers photography every day and is a hobby project of Elja Trum's that got out of hand. The articles are written by a team of volunteer authors. If you would enjoy writing one or more articles for Photofacts, do get in touch.More about PhotofactsPhotofacts is made possible in part by
