Sunday, October 14, 2012

White Balance

I have always felt I could pretty much ignore this setting on my camera, which turns out to be mostly true, for everyday photos. But not entirely!  My camera, with it's white balance set on AUTO, makes good guesses about true color. But this assignment showed me that I can help the camera out by using the settings to make its job easier. 







I took this photo before I knew anything about white balance settings. I had just painted this room and wanted to show my son, who lives in D.C.  The AUTO white balance setting did a good job.  It's close enough to the actual color of the paint and I was mostly satisfied.








For the first photo I took for this assignment, I left the WB setting on AUTO for comparison purposes. 


It was a cloudy day, so next I set the WB to SHADE to warm the colors up a little bit. My camera doesn't have a setting for CLOUDY but I figured this would have the same effect. I think the color looks unnatural; it's too yellow.


I wanted to see what the camera would do if I told it that I was using incandescent light - here is the result. The camera compensated by toning down the warm tones from the picture and the resulting shot is very cold and blue. Pretty awful.



After I understood the effects you can get by overriding the camera's AUTO white balance settings, I played around with some apples.
This is the same room as the first photo, so if you look at the wall behind the table you can see that the AUTO setting captured the color most accurately. The FLUORESCENT setting added warm yellow tones, and the TUNGSTEN setting removed them and made the wall look blue.



tungsten      


auto

fluorescent     


Now, what if you wanted to created a particular effect? I did that here. I put the lens on Macro close-up, used a tripod and a super slow shutter speed to take this shot of some shells and things in a thick, bubbly glass vase.  I was going for a dreamy, other-worldly kind of feeling. On the first shot I set the white balance to compensate for the incandescent light. The second shot has the white balance on AUTO. Which one looks more magical?




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