Send us photos of your church in the snow!

“For to the snow He says, ‘Fall on the earth,’ And to the downpour and the rain, ‘Be strong.’  Job 37:6

Texans rarely complain about moisture falling on the earth in any form, and snow does so in a particularly lovely way.

So when you can safely take a photo of your church in the snow, please do so and send us the photo. Your cell phone can take excellent photos if you don’t have a camera handy. Let’s grab the loveliness while we can – and then we can savor not only the loveliness, but also enjoy them in July and August, when we are all baking in the heat.

Send your church-in-the-snow photos to tracie.middleton@edotn.org and we’ll post them on a gallery page on the diocesan website for all to enjoy.

Susan Kleinwechter, social media and website coordinator for our diocese, offers a few tips for taking photos in the snow:

• Your camera is likely to overcompensate for the amount of white and reflected light it detects, thus automatic camera modes can be often over-exposed, too bright and washed out. If you can increase your shutter speed or decrease the aperture opening (increase the f-stop number), you can control the amount of light coming in. Some cell phones have apps to help with manual settings, and some have snow modes. Are there settings on your camera you haven’t used before?
• Sometimes you get a blueish cast to snow pictures, so if you can adjust the white balance to compensate for that, you’ll have photos with a truer color. Some cell phone settings and apps let you manage the white balance or scene mode.
• For composition, having something interesting in the foreground can bring a photo alive. You can also play around with where you focus, because changing the depth of field can add interest to a photo.
• Sometimes you have the best composition ever, but the color is off. There are free apps available on cell phones for manipulating a photo’s color and brightness. Get creative with a filter, or remove the color altogether and desaturate the image; the gray tones let your composition shine.