Twilight, Rocky Mountain National Park. Sirius, Canis Major, Orion, Taurus, the Hyades star cluster, and the Pleiades star cluster are all visible in the fading light. Click for a larger version.

You can photograph the night sky year around, but winter brings an added bonus: SNOW!  When you don’t have the benefit of moonlight, most of the year you get a black, silhouetted skyline. In winter you have the possibility of including the highly reflective snow. For many photographers winter is their favorite time of year to photograph the night sky.

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Cougar

Most wildlife are medium to dark in tone, making them a challenge to meter properly in the bright, white tones of winter. If you trust your camera’s auto exposure modes, the odds are good you won’t get the best exposure. If you switch over to manual exposure and make the right decisions, you can get great exposures and better quality photos (more about that later).

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Mount Hunter from a Bush Plane. Denali National Park. Alaska.

Metering for scenes with a lot of snow can be tricky since the bright snow fools the camera meter. I see a lot of winter photos with gray snow, which means the camera meter did exactly what it was designed to do and the camera owner didn’t know how to use exposure compensation. The solution is quite simple provided you know what to do.

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Last Light on El Capitan, Yosemite National Park

Update: December 18, 2015. This series was revised and expanded last winter (January through March 2015) and I will update it again beginning in January 2016, but for some of you winter is NOW, so I am re-posting this set of links so you have them now.

Update: January 9, 2016. As of today five of articles have been revised and updated from last year’s versions. I have also written several new articles that are related to this series and included links. Over the next few days I will revise and update the rest of the articles. Stay tuned.

In addition to all of the usual photographic challenges, winter provides some extra complications, especially in terms of metering. So I began my series of articles on winter photography. This year I revised three prior articles and added six new ones. They will help you meet the unique challenges of winter photography. So read the articles, get out there, have fun, and create some stunning images!

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