Cedar Park recently had a large amount of snowfall for the area. Typically, it will snow about a half-inch and then melt in a few hours. This time it snowed about four inches and covered the roads, which is rare.
No matter how good a camera meter you have, you will have to adjust it if you take pictures of snow. There are two types of meters. The first is reflective, which is what all cameras use. This will measure the reflected light off of a scene. The second is an incident meter, which actually measures the amount of light that falls on something. Incident meters are always handheld and are always correct if appropriately used.
Your camera’s meter is calibrated to meter for middle gray. Middle gray is the average reflectivity of a scene, and most of the time, your meter will work fine. However, the two situations that can fool it are if you shoot something all white or all black. With an all white scene, you must bump up the exposure, and with an all black setting, you must underexpose to have it exposed correctly.
When I was photographing the snow, I had to bump the exposure by one stop. The photos were still a little underexposed, but I just only had to bump them up by about .3 stops in post. I used my new Nikon 28-300mm AF-S Nikkor f/3.5-5.6G ED VR to take these pictures.
As always, knowing to adjust your exposure meter is the best way to photograph a scene. I could have adjusted the pictures in post production since the exposure was only off about a stop, but I would lose dynamic range.