Snow Business

A couple of days ago the Daily Mash carried a feature  “‘UK braced for mediocre weather photography‘ SNOWY weather will result in a million of pictures of nothing much, experts have warned” and this morning I decided to play my part in making this prophecy come true.

It had looked pretty promising the night before as I walked home through the falling snow, making the Staines back streets look almost fairy-tale, at least with the benefit of the best part of a bottle of a rather fine Sauvignon Blanc inside me. I should get out and take some pictures I thought, but not for long as I reached a warm house, coffee and biscuits and bed.

So this morning, bright and early (not that early, but the only footprints other than ours from the night before on our local stretch of pavements were those of the neighbourhood fox) I donned long-johns and an extra pair of socks underneath my normal boots, bags and jacket and with two pairs of gloves and a woolly hat sweated my way around Staines.

Bridge over River Colne, Staines Moor (D300, 70/105mm)

Staines unlike Rome, is built around seven rivers, or possibly more. The main one of these is of course the Colne, which reaches the Thames here, and the rest are (or were) bits of water from the Colne finding their own way into the Thames, and my route took me to the County Ditch and across the Wyradisbury River, the River Colne, Bonehead Ditch and Sweeps Ditch. We also have several rather mysterious streams that appear around Moor Lane and Yeoveney either from the Colne or old gravel workings and then disappear, doubtless into culverts, but the one I count as the seventh is an artificial ditch, the Staines Aqueduct, taking water from the Thames to various reservoirs.

My bridge over Bonehead Ditch, Staines Moor (D700, 16mm)

So the Romans, who called Staines ‘Ad Pontes’ or ‘at the bridges’ knew what they were talking about, and my route included a number of them, including two on Staines Moor, one of which was natural rather than man-made.

Animals feeding in snow on Staines Moor (D700, 17mm)

I’ll write more about Staines and my route in a day or two on My London Diary, but here I’ll concentrate on the photographic aspects. Digital makes photographing snow a lot easier, both in taking the pictures and in ‘developing’ them. Probably every photographer knows that cameras have exposure problems in snow, because exposure generally relies on scenes ‘averaging to grey’. Many of us back in the old days used to carry around a ‘gray card’ specially produced (and priced) with a neutral gray that reflected 18% of the incident light. When taking stuff on colour neg it was handy to put that in one corner of the image so you could balance using it when printing, and for getting the exposure spot-on you stuck it in your scene and took a light reading from it.

Nowadays I usually let the camera more or less work it out, though today for snow I set it to give an extra stop of exposure and then checked that the histogram looked more or less fine, going more or less all the way across to the right of the graph, but not past it. On many of the scenes I could have used two stops more and still been OK, but there would have been too great a chance of blocked highlights.

Part of circle of trees on Staines Moor (D300, 10.5mm)

In Lightroom, most of these images did need a positive tweak to the exposure to bring the brightest highlights right across the the right hand side of the histogram. Then I had to bring down the brightness to get the kind of texture I wanted for the snow. Apparently the next version of Lightroom won’t have the two controls, which leaves me wondering how I’m going to do that kind of thing – I think it will probably mean I’ll have to go back to working with the ‘Tone Curve’ as I used to with the previous Raw Shooter software. The slider that I’d actually like to get rid of is the ‘Recovery’ one, which I’ve learnt always to set at zero. Not that you don’t sometimes need to recover highlights, but that it is always best to do so on a local basis rather than the overall image degradation that the ‘Recovery’ slider provides.

My D300 is now severely in need of a service – or a replacement. I’ve been hoping for a while that Nikon would bring out a replacement either for the D300s or the D700 or both so I can retire it. Apart from the cracked plastic on the top-plate LCD which doen’t bother me, it now sometimes fails to return the mirror after an exposure, and simply stops working, which obviously does.

Staines Town Hall, sold by the local council for pennies and now a pub.(D700, 21mm, slight crop)

It happened for the first time a month or two back, and after a lot of cursing I found a way round. Use the menu and select to raise the mirror for cleaning, press OK and then the shutter release to ‘raise’ it (though it’s already raised), then switch off the camera and it comes down just as it should, and when you switch the camera back on it works properly again.

If it happens – as it has recently – perhaps once a day it’s annoying but not a problem. But this morning it did it at least a dozen times, which became rather a pain.

Staines Aqueduct which carries Thames water to the reservoirs. (D700, 16mm)

It’s also sometimes having problems focussing. A few times it did a bit of hunting rather than the usual fast focus. In the end I switched to manual focus, but by that time I was in any case working with the 10.5mm fisheye, where there is very seldom any need to focus at all.  The only problem with manual focus is that when you switch to manual there is virtually no resistance to turning the focus ring, and it is easy to knock it away from the infinity setting that normally works for virtually any distance.

More pictures and more about Staines on My London Diary shortly.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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