Daesani goes out in the snow

[Severity]

Everyone is envying your snow...the only thing I have to envy is how clean it is, haha, when I was a kid I lived in a rural county with a huge yard...now I live in a small apartment in a small town right on the street & sidewalk, so the top layer of my snow is all grey from the road salt. Not good for photos. Anyone else who wants snow is welcome to travel to the snowbelt of Ohio and scoop up all the snow you want :p

That said, I love this photo shoot; Daesani looks warm enough to be enjoying herself in the snow (and she's just a lovely doll) and your pictures are, as always, gorgeous.

[AliceMR]

Thank you all!

love the lighting in the third photo. It's so hard to get good snow photos, how do you do it??

Hmm, well, my little postage-stamp digicam doesn't do that well in low light or high contrast, and it was kind of contrasty especially in that photo. I just point and shoot... for most of these I just lightened the shadows a bit and dimmed the highlights equally a bit to reduce the range, then tweaked the contrast a bit. I think it helped that there wasn't a big area of bright sun on snow. I miss my "real" camera but just don't have a film developing option right now.
If your problem with snow is that it's too bright, does your camera let you adjust eosure by a stop or 2? I usually forget about that... something I would do naturally with my film camera but I forget about all the little buttons & settings on the digital Contrast? Kind of have to deal with that in photoshop I guess. (I dunno; is that much help? Doesn't sound like it!)

No it totally helps! I'm horrible about figuring out the right type of contrast hahah! The buttons on cameras are so confusing, The last time I took pictures I couldnt even figure out how to hide a graph that showed RGB levels when I took my pictures! You do have quite the talent!!

[Alliecat]

Thank you so much, everyone
Snow gets OLD... I so totally envy you guys in warmer places, posting pictures in winter that are greeeeen...! And yeah, the snow gets grubby here too along the roads, but I have a nice little woodlot out back. This was a couple days after the snow, so it was getting speckled with bits blown off trees. I didn't wind up getting to shoot right after the snowfall when it was all nice & fluffy. (oops I said 'nice'. Well, ok, for a few hours after it snows, it's pretty. Then you can HAVE it!! )
She is such an overlooked doll... you'd never know how pretty she is under that goofy helmet in the stock photos.
AliceMR, I'm a die-hard film shooter and have no idea what to do with RGB. For doll photos I use a little mini Pentax Optio that I had to get for work. Shooting with film, I would open up a stop or 2 for snow -- meaning take it 2 stops brighter than you think you should because the meter is fooled by the bright snow and will undereose. With the digicam, I think it's already adjusting for that (?). I've played with the eosure adjustment a wee bit but not in snow. Generally with digital pix that are contrasty, I lighten the shadows & decrease the highlights so there's not such a range between them, then when that difference is reduced, I increase the contrast on what's left. If you don't have photoshop there are other free programs you can use. I do try to avoid shots where there are really bright & dark areas because they're harder to fix (Daesani sitting on the tree, for example) plus I find the dolls' faces bleach out in bright light & you can't always fix that and have it still look nice!
And, if you have a lot of contrast or bright background, you can use flash to lighten their faces if they're shadowed. Again, bleach-out problems, and flashing through kleenex or paper to dim it can change the colour (yes, even white kleenex!), and I'm not getting a schmancy diffuser for that little camera, so I've figured out it works better to back off and use the zoom, then the flash is farther away and dim enough (4th pic, & bucket one).