Cuckmere in the Snow

Snow is a rare sight around Sussex these days and the oppotunity to get out when it finally fell in April 2008 was one not to be missed. After a steady night of consistant heavy snow there was a good layer a few inches deep when we awoke. I'd had a few places in mind that I wanted to photograph in snowy conditions and the Cuckmere valley was one of them. With the roads in a very poor condition I decided that this spot not too far from home would be safe to drive to. Rhiannon and I bulked out in layers of clothes and set out for the river.

Parking at the nearby pub we started along the track to the coastguard cottages. It had been a long time since I'd last walked this route and I'd forgotten quite how far it is, even in good conditions. Combined with the heavy snow falling and slippery ice underfoot it was quite a testing walk and took us a good hour to reach our objective.

I was pleased to find that the snow was untouched at the top of the hill and the shot scene was nearly as I'd imagined. The only thing I hadn't banked on was the thick snow clouds and low visability. I'd been hoping for clear skies with crisp blues to play against the snow. Instead it was generally pretty grey.

As I've mentioned we don't get the oppotunity to take snow photographs very often and it was going to be a bit of trial and error finding the settings that would work best. Ungloving to make the process a bit easier I attached my 17-40mm lens and placed the camera onto my Manfroto tripod. Since I wanted detail in both foreground and background I chose a reasonably small aperture of F11 in aperture priority mode. This allows the camera to manage the shutter speed required for a proper exposure, which in this case was around 1/250th at ISO160. Since I was using a tripod and mirror lockup I didn't need to be too concerned about the length of the shutter. The next step since most of the scene was white was to increase the exposure compensation by a stop. Camera meters get a bit confused when the scene is not balanced and with snow they have a tendancy to underexpose which creates a very gray looking photograph. Boosting the exposure by 1 stop ensured I would get as much detail as possible out of the scene.

Compositionally I wanted to include the distant Seven Sisters cliffs as they appeared out of the gloom, with the cottages providing the foreground detail. Having learnt from experience I know roughly the position I would need to ensure that the cottages didn't interupt the line of the cliffs behind. Since the sky was very bland I angled the camera down slightly to include a bit more foreground snow (that was the main reason for the trip out after all). Once I was happy with the scene through the viewfinder I took a test shot to see how my exposure was looking.

One of the most useful tools on a digital camera is the instant review and histogram. Much underlooked the histogram is an essential concept to grasp as it allows you to really nail your exposure correctly on location. While post shoot editting in RAW and photoshop provide some scope for recovery, the best and cleanest images are produced when the exposure is set correctly in camera. I could immediately see from my histogram that I'd clicked some highlights in the scene. Easy to do when there's a lot of reflective white surfaces. Not wanting to loose the detail and confident that I had some room to negatively adjust the exposure I dropped my exposure compensation down to +2/3 and shot another frame.

This time the histogram looked more pleasing and with only very minor clicking (easily recoverable in the RAW processing stages) I was happy the shot had been captured. After only a few short minutes we were both getting quite cold in the biting wind and snow. The cameras were starting to get a bit damp and with the weather closing in further we worked a few more angles before packing up and starting the long walk back.

In post editing the true lack of detail from the scene became apparent and when playing around with crops I decided that a panoramic format suited the scene better. This took away some of the boring snow and sky that were really not adding to the photograph and really help focus the viewer attention on the cottages and cliffs beyond.

I really like this photograph and knowing what we went through to capture it makes it even more rewarding that it one of my best sellers for 2008.

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