There are a couple of things you can do when taking pictures in the snow or at a bright beach.

One thing is setting the snow and beach scene modes. To do that, go ahead and press the Function button into the Function menu. Now, here at very end, you’ll see is the scene option so let’s press the Right navigation button and get all the way there.

Now, if you hit Display, you can see down here, you can hit Display to choose different scenes. So, go ahead and hit the Display button. And here, you can see that we have different options for scenes. Here is snow and that’s beach. So, depending on where you’re located, choose one or the other, go ahead and hit Display to get back to the regular Function menu. And then you can just hit the Function button to escape. And that’s one way of doing it.

The other way of doing it is simply increasing the Exposure Compensation. And go ahead and press the Function button. Let’s get out of this mode and go back to the Manual mode. So, just press the Right navigation button as easiest to get back to the Manual mode.

Now, in this mode the camera is not optimized for a beach or snow but since this is the mode that we most often use as supposed to scrolling over and then choosing the different scene mode and that can take sometime, what you can do is just go down to the Exposure Compensation, go ahead and press the Down navigation button to Exposure Compensation. And then just press the Right navigation button to increase the Exposure a third or two-thirds of a stop. You can try both and see which one works better for you.

The reason why you do this is because with such a bright scene like snow, the camera thinks that there’s a lot of light and it will darken the image a little bit not realizing that snow really should be white. So, by brightening it up a little bit, you can compensate for that automatic darkening.

The other thing you would want to do in this case is go down to White Balance and make sure that’s set to Day Light. Go over to the Day Light setting and that will optimize the color to match your scene. So, Exposure Compensation, add plus one-third or plus two-thirds and White Balance set to Day Light. And this is a little bit faster and easier I think than going into the beach or snow scene.

Lastly, what I would recommend doing, press the Function button to escape the function menu. Go ahead and change your ISO. Press the UP navigation button to access ISO and change that to 80. Since we’re working with plenty of light, 80 is the best. It will produce the cleanest image with a least amount of image noise or grain. So, choose ISO 80 and your flash should be turned off. If your flash is set to automatic, it probably won’t fire but go ahead and just press the right navigation button to turn the flash to off. If you are taking a picture of somebody and there’s a lot of shadow, then you would to want to turn the Flash on so just press the Flash so you get to the On option right there.

The automatic option is not going to use the flash because the camera is going to assume that there is already a plenty of light. So, if you want to fill shadows in someone’s face, use the flash. You’re going to have to force it and if you don’t want to use the flash, you can just turn it off.

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