In his latest monthly column, Gala Camera Club’s Ford Renton lifts the lens cap to reveal some tricks of the trade.

It's December now and, as most of the country are battening down the hatches, we keen photographers are getting their thermies ready for sorties outside to shoot winter scenes.

The first pieces of kit before you even think about cameras are proper winter outdoor clothing. Plenty of layers, with a good waterproof top layer. Good thermal socks too as you may find yourself standing around for ages on the spot waiting for suitable light to shoot a scene.

If you are comfortable then you’ll be thinking about photography and not about getting home to a warm fire. That’s protection for you, but you have to think about your equipment too.

Top-end cameras have good weather sealing these days but it may not be 100 per cent effective, so get a rain cover for your camera bag and a cover for your camera. You can easily make a camera cover from plastic bags and rubber bands, and you’re recycling into the bargain.

Another thing to think about is batteries, take at least one spare with you and keep it your pocket, not the camera bag. When it’s really cold the batteries don’t last very long at all so keeping them a bit warmer than ambient maintains their charge until you need it.

Snow scenes make great subjects to photograph, and extremely popular. They are one of my favourite genres, running a close second to pictures of the night sky.

There is a big problem with snow scenes however and that is SNOW. In a lot of hurriedly taken snow scenes, the snow will appear blue or grey. That's not the camera's fault, it's exposure meter doing what it was designed to do and try and get a compromise exposure to fit the whole frame. However, the camera tries to base everything on what we call an 18 per cent grey and averages the exposure to suit. Snow is very reflective, particularly in sunlight, and fools the camera meter into under-exposing the scene hence everything will appear dull and not like the lovely glistening snow you were looking at.

This is where the photographer has to intervene. We deliberately over-expose what the camera meter is telling us by at least one stop, probably two. It varies a little between cameras and personal preference. I like to over-expose by one and a half stops. Stop! What’s a 'stop'? A stop is the doubling or halving of the amount of light reaching your sensor (or film). For example, if the camera meter says expose for 1/60th of a second, one stop over-exposed would be 1/30th of a second and two stops over would be 1/15th of a second. Using this method you compensate for the light meter wanting to under-expose.

On your camera, you can achieve this by either using full manual control of your exposure or using an exposure compensation setting, which many cameras have. Et voila, nice white snow every time. Be careful you don’t drop the shutter speed too low though, or you won't get sharp shots handheld, even with image stabilisation (IS/VR). I try to avoid going below 1/60th handheld, faster than that sometimes, depending on how much coffee I've had.

I’m not going to be popular for saying this but I hope we get 'Beast from the East 2'. I had a couple of the best days out with a camera I’ve had in years during and after that storm.

Here’s a couple of shots I took before sunrise two days before 'The Beast' struck proper. The sunrise one is two exposures blended, one for the sky and one for the snow. If I’d just exposed to get the snow right I’d have blown out the sky. If I’d exposed for the sky the snow would have been dark grey. Sometimes you have to resort to a few tricks.

Photo of the month this time is Festival Salute by our syllabus secretary Alistair Peacock. It is a multi-award-winning image this one, and one my favourites. Taken in Edinburgh around Tattoo time, Alistair asked this US soldier if he could take a photo of him. He obliged by standing to attention and snapping a salute, what a bonus. Perfectly exposed and works well in monochrome, great shot Alistair. You can see more of our club members' images on our website on the galleries page, link on our home page. http://www.galacameraclub.co.uk/members-galleries-and-websites/