Adventure and travel photographer Andrew Peacock has listed some great tips for cold weather photography in this article over at 500px ISO.
You have mainly three concerns. First of all, you need to take care of yourself and stay warm. Second, you want to keep your camera operating despite the cold or even freezing conditions. And last but certainly not least, you want to achieve extraordinary images.
Personal Preparation
Rarely does a decent camera fail in the cold. It is more common for the photographer to give up because of personal discomfort. As an Expedition and Wilderness Medicine Doctor, I often teach folks about the subject of hypothermia, emphasizing how prevention is far better than the cure. For the photographer handling a cold-metal camera on-the-go, or standing still next to a tripod as the winter night falls, the risk of getting too cold is very real. A drop in your core body temperature can begin to subtly affect your creative decision-making (and the standard of your photos) even before significant signs of hypothermia start to show.Layers of warm clothing (not forgetting your head), good wind protection, warm fluids to drink, and fuel in the form of high energy snack food to keep the fire burning inside you are all important. Sufficient protection for your precious extremities is just as essential. Good insulating footwear—and most importantly for the photographer—warm gloves that allow for finger dexterity are imperative.
Camera Preparation
When it comes to camera failure, the primary culprit is the battery. So I like to keep camera batteries close to my body where they can stay warm. As a battery in my camera drops to around 50% power, I will take it out and rotate it with a warm spare. It’s important to carry spare batteries with you for this tip to work.
To improve battery life, make sure you’re familiar with the camera menu and lens options in order to reduce power consumption. Turn off all camera beep functions. Turn off screen review after every shot. Minimize the use of Live View. Turn off any lens or camera image stabilizer function. Mirrorless cameras require that you use the power-hungry LCD screen for composition; for this reason, many outdoor photographers I know prefer cameras with an optical viewfinder option that allows you to compose without using power.
The Photographic Process
Snow and ice in a scene force creative decisions to be made by the photographer because there are often extremes of contrast. The bottom line is that we want the snow (and other elements) to look ‘right’ in the final image, and to include whatever detail there was present in the original scene.Exposure compensation for a scene with ice and/or snow can be done via a menu function allowing you to override the camera metering and adjust the exposure upward. Given time to set the shot up I will experiment with just how much I increase the exposure and fine tune it based on histogram feedback. Once set then I leave it like that while shooting in that environment. Don’t forget to turn exposure compensation off afterward otherwise you’ll find your next set of photos from a more neutral contrast situation will be way overexposed.
I highly recommend selecting RAW file output rather than jpeg in your camera menu settings to improve your ability to get a great shot from a high contrast scene. Jpeg files have already been interpreted and processed by your camera and if you do make a mistake with the exposure on a unique, one off, shot it’s very difficult to ‘fix’ it afterward unless it’s a RAW file. Of course that means having the time to first learn and then use a RAW file editor like Adobe Lightroom to process your files.
Read the full article over at 500px ISO.
Source: 500px ISO
