Lesson Five: Mastering White Balance

White balance is a great setting to adjust and familiarize yourself with.  Depending on the lighting conditions available while you are taking your photos it can change the tone of the entire picture.  White balance is typically used for helping you get the colors in your photo to appear as accurately as you can get them to.  Now most digital cameras have an automatic setting and the camera does this or attempts to do this on its own.  Usually it works, however sometimes the lighting situation it too different for it to fix on its own, this is when you would adjust it based on the situation at hand.  For example, if you are taking a lot of photos under fluorescent lighting then you are going to want to adjust your camera accordingly for this because fluorescent lights tend to make the colors and the overall tone of the photo to appear bluish.  This makes the whole photo look darker and colder. To fix this coloring situation you are going to tell your camera to do the opposite of what is really happening.  You are going to adjust it so that even though it thinks it is already bright enough and wants to tone down the photo it is going to make it brighter this will allow you to get rid of the bluish tone to your photo and brighten it up so the colors look more accurate to what they are. However, if you are working for the day under incandescent lighting then the exact opposite effect with be happening.  You will notice your photos will have a yellowish tone to them, this is going to cause the entire photo to have the yellowish tone making the picture seem brighter warmer and more inviting by nature.  However, if this is not the desired outcome you were hoping for then you are going to want to adjust the white balance setting on your camera.  Again you are going to want to do the opposite of what the camera is doing.  The camera thinks there is not enough light so it is making the picture brighter and in turn distorting the coloring.  You want to tell your camera that there is plenty of lighting and to let in less lighting.  This will allow your photo to tone down away from the yellowish color and back to the natural colors you were hoping to capture in the first place.  Usually white balance is not anything that we have to adjust, most cameras have an automatic setting that will correctly adjust according to the lighting that is present, but there are a few exceptions to every rule!  Finally I have my camera and it is correctly working so I will make sure to post my photos this week for the past few posts and this one so everyone can see and comment if they wish to on my work!