Why is there Blue Snow in my Photo?

Have you ever looked at a photograph of snow and wondered why it looked a little blue in the shaded areas? When you took the photo outside, it didn’t look like blue snow, but it does in your photograph or perhaps it looked blue on the back of your phone, but it didn’t look blue in front of your face. Why is that? And what can we learn from it?

When we look at snow, we hardly ever see it as blue. So then why does our camera see blue snow? Good question.

When the sky reflects down on white snow, the white snow catches the blue color from the sky making the snow appear blue. And gray skies can have a similar effect on the white snow.

When our cameras processes our snow photographs and don’t process them as white, it is because of the incorrect light illuminating the snow. In the shade areas and under the clouds the snow in our photos may look blue. However, in the direct light of the sun, the camera doesn’t record blue snow. In the direct sun, the snow comes out white.

How Come I don’t See Blue Snow

Just like our cameras, our eyes see the snow as blue because our eyes are just biological cameras. However, our brain is a sophisticated processor, and  it knows the snow is white and therefore perceives it as white. Only on a rare day does our brain ever perceive the snow as blue.

However, now that I made you aware of this, your brain may start perceiving the blue snow (I hope I didn’t ruin how you look at snow).

Let’s look at this with a spiritual perspective.

The Bible and White as Snow

The Bible says in Isaiah 1:18 that God will wash away our sin, and make us white as snow. So we are made white as snow by the righteousness of Jesus Christ. But sometimes because of the sins we still struggle with, we may see ourselves as not so white. But the truth is we have been made white by the grace of God. We did not make ourselves white as snow, God did.

When we confess our sins and are forgiven, our hearts are made white by the blood of Christ. So when we look at ourselves under the correct light of Scripture, we see that we are made white, and not blue, red, or any other color. We are white as snow in the sunshine.

There are some other spiritual parallels I can draw out from blue snow, but I’ll save those for another correspondence. In the meantime, email me some of your snow photos. I’d love to see them.

Blessings,

Pasquale Mingarelli

PS.
If you want some technical help with this issue, here’s a video I did on that using Photoshop. You can use other software as well. There are some things you can do on your phone to minimize this, but they are limited.