Dan Perovich's Cyberfront Property

Photo365-20091219 – Winter Wonderland, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
0.6 sec @ f/8.0, ISO 800, 18 mm (EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS)

This was the view tonight out our front door in Leesburg, VA.  We got hit with the “Storm of the Century” today.  By my last measurement, we had about sixteen inches on the ground.  Believe it or not, this is the view of our street after the plows came by twice earlier in the day.  It is going to be a lot of fun digging out of this tomorrow!

I used my tripod to take this “long” exposure.  I wanted to avoid using an ISO higher than 800 so that I did not have a lot of noise in the picture.  All the white snow caused havoc on the 7D’s white balance sensor.  I would not say that the 7D auto white balanced turned all the snow gray like many professionals say a DSLR will.  Instead, it turned the picture yellowish.  This was quickly fixed in Lightroom using the eyedropper white balance tool.  I used the mail boxes on the middle left of the frame as my gray point for the tool.

Easy and flexible white balance adjustments are just two more of the many reasons to always shoot in the RAW format on your DSLR.  Sure, there is an extra step of converting the RAW format to a JPG to be shared, but it gives you so much more flexibility in post-processing.  Many photos that I have shot would have been trash if I had shot them exclusively in JPG format.