Photography Tips For Every Season

Written by Trinity Duong

Capturing photographs are an incredibly rewarding experience as it is something that will accompany you throughout your entire life and past it. It’s a memory that you get to share with your loved ones and it will continue to inspire generations to come. Digital media has opened up an infinity of new doors that allow us to keep as many photographs as we want and encourage us to produce and capture as many as we can. This means holiday memorabilia, birthday montages, life albums, and as many subcategories as you can think of. Year-round photographs mean all different seasons and this can even mean all different locations. Location affects weather conditions and that means all types of issues can arise that can mess with your frames. 

Here are some tips for shooting in various seasons and conditions that can help you produce the highest quality image.

1) Shooting In Rain

Rain photography has become an overtly dramatic scene filled with emotional and artistic tones and moods. It is a highly demanding task that not many are prepared to shoot in, for both the photographer and model. Learning the key features for rain photography will transform the beauty of rain into your favorite frame. 

Rain photography works with low light, darker skies, deeply unsaturated colors, and of course water. The best camera to use is a DSLR camera. Images hardly turn out as good as they can on a smartphone camera so having a lens that has a dynamic range and ISO meters will be life-changing. 

Some tips to look at is keeping your ISO medium to high in order to cope with the low lighting, This can help your fast shutter speed that can catch the detail in the raindrops. Having a fast shutter speed helps any image that contains a lot of motion and with rain turbulence is to be expected. Keep a large aperture as well to allow more light into the camera as the shutter is going off and try and keep a source of light behind the rain to bring droplets into focus. 

However, if you can’t get your hands on a manual camera, a little bit of editing can go a long way. Because there is low saturation on your image opt for a black and white filter to feed into the moodiness of the image as well as bring out the natural shadows provided in your work.

2) Shooting In Snow

If you live in a snowy part of the world year-round or at least in the winter, knowing the best photography tips for this weather condition will elevate your work to the next level. Snow is magical and capturing the wonderland is a great material for your social media.

While snow is a challenge the results are well worth it so here are some tips to shoot in the snow.
Adjusting your exposure is a must. The fresh, white blanket of snow is beautiful but it can cause issues to the lighting because it is so bright. Therefore adjusting your exposure to a +1 or +2 will help a lot to ensure your photo is clear and not overexposed. Most cameras also offer a cloudy or shade setting to help with the lighting. Alternatively shooting on a smartphone you can always edit your image and darken its features.

You should also adjust your white balance which can be done on a camera or on an editing app like VSCO. Often snow can produce a blue tint that causes images to be too cold so adjusting this will help even out the color on your image.

And just like in the rain portion of this article, adjusting your shutter speed will do the exact same to the snow as it does rain!

3) Sunrise To Sunset

Too often do we try and take photos of the sunrises and sunsets and are disappointed by the lack of exposure or saturation on either the subject or background. Results often don’t do the experience justice so how can we improve the chances of capturing the perfect shot? 

Opposite to our tips on rain photography, you should opt for a low to mid-range ISO instead of a high one. During these periods of the day, there’s less available light than in the middle of the day so compensate for an ISO setting of 200,400 or 800 for the best lighting. You should also choose a high aperture that allows for greater depth for everything in the foreground and the background is sharply focused. 

Expanding your subject matter is also deeply important as it can capture the colors cast by the sun. Taking a step back and incorporating nature, people, or anything else in the foreground and the middle ground will create the most beautiful arrays of sunlight on the body. 

Everything aside, your style of photography and atmosphere should reflect yourself and are extremely important to represent you as an artist. Playing with the setting until you achieve the best image in your eyes will be fun technique building and will establish your aesthetic more prominently. 

If you love photography tips check out our other articles “5 Apps To Create The Finest Instagram Posts” and “BMG’s Favorite Editing Apps”