Shadows tend to take their colour from the surrounding light, which is scattered due to diffuse radiation in the Earth's atmosphere. On a bright day, the blue sky is scattered and reflected on the surface on which the shadow falls.
I find that blue snow looks strange in a photograph, the colour far too exaggerated by the sensor, which is trying to balance the light. I try to compensate with the white balance in post processing, and while it's hard to get rid of all the blue, I can make the image look closer to what my brain registers when it looks at the snowy shadow.
This week, I found myself looking out my family room window, into my back yard. The sun was growing low in the sky as the day turned to that golden hour before sunset. The snow in the back corner was untouched by the rabbits that tend to roam freely in our yard and the sunlight was seeping through the cedar slats of our fence.
The wind had blown the snow so that it was not perfectly level, and the lines in the snow accentuated the contours. With my smartphone in hand, I focused on the unblemished shadows and shot.
Naturally, the shadows appeared blue. even the lines of light, etched by direct sunshine, held a blue tone.
In post processing, I was tempted to reduce the blue saturation and apply white balancing, but there was something about that colour, how it almost matched the perfect blue sky. Instead of reducing the colour saturation, I increased it.
I applied a more-stark contrast, lightening the paler blue of the thin lines. The snow no longer looked like snow: it looked like a striped blanket.
Posting the image to Instagram, I applied a pre-set filter, which darkened the blue even more. And because Instagram doesn't accept 16:9 ratio, portrait images, part of the image was lost.
Here's the full-framed image, which I further enhanced with the Google Photos editor.
I'm less inclined to compensate for the blue in future snow scenes. What do you think?
Happy Friday!
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