John Caldwell
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It's a nice shot Stephanie, and I think you made a good compromise in exposure between the boy and the BG lights. Had you refused all over-exposure in the BG elements, he would be a blob of black.
There really are only two possible solutions for dealing with such vastly different exposure requirements, and even they will not be easy given Balto's very dark face against the white snow.
1) Add fill light, probably through off-camera flash, but try to direct the light preferentially to his face and body and less to the snow. Even then, getting the ratio of subject light and background light isn't simple, the trouble of exposing the snow notwithstanding. Here is a recent discussion in the Lighting forum that addresses using strobes in combination with small twinkly background lights to achieve a common holiday look:
https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1256667/0?keyword=christmas#11961743
2) Make separate exposures, each exposure optimized for the elements they are capturing, and blend them subsequently in PS. Balto will need his own exposure; the BG highlights their own, and possibly the snow its own. Working with a stationary camera helps, but isn't essential.
As for the color cast on the foreground snow, it's really an artistic choice to leave it or not. Magenta snow isn't wrong, as I see it, when the context is the one you have here. Getting rid of the cast, providing you wanted to, won't be as simple as white balancing the entire scene to the snow, thereby rendering the snow neutral gray, because the light in a shot like this is inevitably mixed. When light is as skewed as it may be when there are prominent colors incident on a subject, you're stuck shooting a color chart placed at the area of *interest*. Were I striving for correct color registration and WB on Balto's face, for example, I'd place a Passport Color Checker at his face, shoot it at a representative exposure, and generate a DNG profile from that shot. You can then white balance to the chart's grey tones, and impose the custom profile you just made. That will render Balto *correctly*, but the rest of your image will probably need other color work because regional light will vary so much.
Adobe's free DNG profile editor is what I use to do this, but there are other options like the Passport Color Checker software. Here's the Adobe DNG editor for Mac:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5493
Thanks for chiming in with Balto. Love that boy.
John-
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