Snow!

Saturday was sunny and warm. The kids spent the day playing outside. I noticed the first crocuses blooming. Then snow moved in Sunday morning and covered everything in a white blanket. That’s East Tennessee winter for you. It’s enough cold to remind you it’s winter and enough warm to remind you that spring is on the way.

We wanted to see more snow so we took a daytrip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There seemed to be more snow in Walland than at home, but a few miles later in Townsend the snow level had dropped. Once we got in the park it was no better, but we drove to Sugarlands anyway.

Nope. The snow wasn’t any deeper there. We turned up 441 and made our way up the mountains past the Chimneys and Mt. LeCeonte to Newfound Gap, up in the spruce-fir zone. There was a little more snow there along with some impressive icicles from water seeping out of the rocks. It was definitely cold as all get out up on top. We only kept the girls outside for a few minutes before diving back inside the vehicle.

On the way back we stopped in Gatlinburg at Howard’s Steakhouse, where we had a good dinner served by a very nice Romanian waitress with a pretty accent. Howard’s is one of our favorite restaurants in Gatlinburg. It’s on the main drag near the park entrance and we can always find parking. The prices are reasonable and in warm weather we like eating on the back patio which overlooks LeConte Creek. Their pickles are delicious and their onion rings are colossal.

Photography notes: gray snow

The snow pictures are underexposed,

I uploaded these pictures without giving them a lot of thought. After seeing the pictures on my blog later on I noticed they were underexposed and brightened them up as best as I could in software. It’s pretty easy to wind up with gray snow when the skies are overcast.

From what I recall from photography class, here’s what happens. The lightmeter in your digital camera assumes a world where on average everything reflects a certain percentage of the light that falls on it. (There are varying accounts of the exact percentage, but 18% is often cited, so we’ll use that.)

For most pictures that works fine. Trees and grass reflect about that amount of light, for instance. You get into trouble with high reflectance scenes and low reflectance scenes – the proverbial white cat in a snowstorm or the black cat in the coalmine.

In the snowstom the camera sees a bunch of light and thinks “The world reflects 18% of light, so since I’m seeing all of this reflected light it must be really bright out. I’ll reduce the exposure.” Result: underexposed snow scenes. In the coalmine the camera sees very little light and thinks “The world reflects 18% of light, so since I’m seeing very little light it must be super dark so I’ll increase the exposure.” Result: overexposed scenes in coalmines and places with black walls.

You can fiddle with manual exposure to get around this, but it can take some trial and error. Most digital cameras these days have scene modes for common shooting problems. The scene options usually include a snow mode for dealing with high reflectance situations. If I had thought of it at the time I would have tried it. The other option would have been manual exposure, but when I’m with the kids I usually don’t have time to manually adjust aperture and shutter speed so I have to rely on the auto and scene modes.