help with settings

[jongeeone]

just bought a s50 , going skiing this weekend hopeing to take some pics
is it best to leave it on auto or try some manual settings , just worried that all the whiteness of the snow will give me duff pics , any help appreciated

[Jesper]

Experiment! With a digital camera an extra shot doesn't cost anything, and if the photo is bad, you can immediately delete it.

With snow, you'll probably want to use a bit of exposure compensation on the + side (for example +1.0 or so). That's because the light meter of your camera is calibrated to make the overall brightness of the whole photo as bright as average gray, which works for most subjects. It won't work well for snow, because the average brightness of a photo with a lot of snow is supposed to be almost white, not gray. So if you set exposure compensation to +1, the camera will make the photo a bit brighter.