White balance

I recently blogged about white balance and left little explanation. Hence, here's a low-tech quickie primer on white balance for DSLR (and possibly point-n-shoot) photography (also applicable to video cameras as well).

Every shooting situation requires your camera adjust to the color of the light that is being used for making the exposure.

You've no doubt seen different color casts on your images when shooting in certain situations. This used to be more prevalent when shooting film but now, digital cameras are much more adept at handling the situation with some exceptions.

However, for people wanting to take the next step up in controlling their images you need to consider "telling" your camera what color or temperature of light you're shooting with.

Instead of using the "auto" white balance, you can choose to select a variety of situational settings like "cloudy," "daylight," "incandescent," "fluorescent," and "open shade" amongst others.

These are handy for quick calculations and when you're shooting on the fly.

But to get really serious, you need to purchase a white balance tool such as a diffusion screen or white/gray/black card or some such.

I prefer a white/gray/black card. It works very well for me. You need to check your camera's manual for instructions on how to exactly do the procedure. Essentially you hold the white/gray/black portion of the card directly in the light you are shooting in and take a closeup photo of the white portion while in the white balance mode as directed by your camera manufacturer.

This sets the camera's white balance for that particular setting. If the light changes, you simply redo the procedure and adjust for the changing conditions.

It's a hassle and it's easy to just pick a preset white balance, but I've found many of the presets are not very accurate because they cannot account for all kinds of situations. They are just averages.

This is just a quickie to get you started exploring white balance. I will add more later about including the white/gray/black card in your photos to further help with white balance.