Photographing snow

The tones in snow on overcast days are very subtle, and it’s easy to blow them out in which texture and detail disappear. The demarcation line, so to speak, between a blown highlight (an area that’s solid white) and the retention of tonality is noise. If there is even a small amount of noise, then the highlights have not been overexposed. With winter weather like you see here --a blanket of snow, low clouds and mist -- I take the exposure as dictated by the meter -- meaning, the pictures are going to be dark by about one to one and a third f/stops. This protects the subtle highlights from becoming so light that texture and detail are lost. I then make the adjustments to correct the exposure in post-processing. Alternatively, you can use a handheld light meter on incident mode to derive the perfect exposure. Then, you'd switch to manual exposure mode and use the settings provided by the meter. That’s what I used to do when I shot medium format transparencies years ago. My settings were 1/1000, f/11, and 400 ISO, and I used a 24-105mm lens.