Snow!

The histogram is your friend.

What happens with snow is that your camera tries to make it grey. That is because the metering in our cameras make the assumption that every scene is "average" and that "average" is approx 18% grey.

So if you have a scene in front of you that is predeminantly white the camera is still thinking "make it grey" white being brighter than grey gets pulled down from the correct exposure to make it that muddy grey. So to compensate you need to tell your camera to overexpose.

By how much depends on just how bright the day is. Can be anything from 1 to 3 stops. Best to take a test shot and check the histogram. If the peaks are shooting off the right hand side, dial it down a bit till you are getting the peaks just hit the right hand edge. Then you have as much information in your image as possible. (Or enable blinkies so you can see in the image where the blown bits are)

Same goes if you are shooting something dark, the camera will then overexpose to pull the dark stuff up from black to grey. It's inherent in how cameras work and why you really can't trust their metering 100% but have to learn to apply your own interpretations.
 
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