I was out in the snow the other day and the sun was out and the river looked amazing with frozen Ice jutting out over it. I wanted to get some pics that showed the flow of the water, while not overexposing. I am new to photography, and my SS was set at 1 second, at f22. It was so blown out i couldn't even seen the river. I couldn't get the aperature any smaller, what am I doing wrong??
What was the ISO set at? In bright sunlight follow the F16 rule. Exposure should equal speed (1/ISO) at F16. As an example if ISO is 200 then you should be exposing at 1/200th second at F16 and that should get you in the ballpark. You can adjust the ISO or F stop from that point to nail the exposure. My guess is that the ISO was set way to high and a 1 second exposure was way to long in bright sunlight.
The other thing to remember when shooting in snow is that the meter will be fooled by the amount of light reflected by the snow. You will usually want to give your shot 1 to 2 stops more exposure than the meter reads. In the example above you might want to shoot at F8 or F11 to let in more light so the snow is white and not a dirty gray color.
F/22 is going to look bad because diffraction limits the realistic ability to stop down a lens. You need to lower the ISO as much as possible and set the aperture as high as possible. Don't guess on the shutter speeds, set it to aperture priority if you want to choose the aperture, or set it to shutter priority at 1 second and let it adjust the exposure and aperture to get a reasonably good shot (exposure wise).
As said, there is only that much you can do in camera when the sun is out. In midday with clear skies and out of shade you exposure is f/16 at 1/ISO. So if your camera has ISO 200 minimum then your exposure is 1/200 at f/16. Or 1/100 at f/22. So if you set your exposure to 1s then your scene is 7 stops over-exposed. Which is just pure white. In cases like that you need a Neutral Density filter (or two, or three which you stack), so that you can control exposure.
It would be better to try again early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is low which will tame the exposure times. Or you could even do an ultra-long exposure at night.
Thanks a ton for the info guys! I think I'm gonna try the night photography with an ultra long exposure. That sounds exciting. I appreciate the info, I'm so new to this.
