The problem you run into with taking pics on like a ski slope for example is that snow is sooo freakin bright, and camera light meters are set to medium grey. What ends up happening is if you meter for the snow, the snow will look too dark. If you're in manual mode and you have a light meter that is stuck taking the snow into account, you want to do less of an exposure than is indicated so the snow looks actually white instead of a long enough exposure to make the snow medium grey. The last time I took pics on a ski slope I used spot metering and metered for my actual subject, that being the boarder. Generally speaking that will give you a proper result and also make the snow look nice and white. Since the subject is always going to be darker than the background you don't have to worry about the meter trying to make the white snow look grey. Of course this was with my Canon EOS A2 35 mm SLR and not a point-n-shoot digicam so I dunno how much of a spot meter you can achieve with a point-n-shoot. My Canon S200 digi has a spot meter setting but I don't know how small of a spot that really is. Still that's what I would go for. I guess as long as the spot is reasonably small one could use that. I would recommend taking a few pics in whatever lighting there is at a given time and with the spot meter, then see if any exposure compensation is needed. As long as the light stays the same then you won't really have to worry about playing with the compensation too much.

 

thanks for the tip. i hope it works out ok.