White Balance

Auto, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten, Florescent, Daylight, Flash, Underwater, Custom, and Kalvin; these are the main White Balance options you will find in most DSLR’s today. Photography is a wonderful tool but cameras are only able to operate based on algorithms and numeric values. Unlike our eyes and brain function, a camera is an unbiased interpretation to light color and how it is reflected off a given surface. Before I go off into the depths of mathematics I don’t understand or mislead those of you reading this. Know these few things about white balance: White balance is a color corrective setting with the goal of making sure white stays white, greens look green, and blues are true blues. The human eye is advanced and couple this with the brain you have a complexly engineered ability to compensate for distorted colors within a given scene. White balance is mostly designed as a corrective tool to untangle the cameras unbiased view of color temperature on the Kalvin scale. A typical mid-level or pro DSLR can run from about 2500K to 10000K. My Olympus can go as low as 2000K and as high as 14000K. What if you want to emphasis certain colors in an image? Using cloudy can warm up a scene. Using daylight or flash white balance can cool it down. I am a big proponent of getting it right in camera but sometimes we end up with happy accidents. Say you are photographing a landscape and you were to change up the white balance to see how it looks rather than holding off until the post production… you may just be surprised at what stands out to you once the colors shift. This could inspire you to recompose and begin making a whole new image. That you can’t do when you are in post.

Happy Shooting!

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