Camera Shooting Techniques And White Balance

If your camera shooting techniques have allowed you to omit thinking about white balance, then you should read this article. Many digital cameras come with a control for something called white balance which allows you to correct your images with white balance settings. White balance is important because different light sources have different color temperatures, meaning that when you photograph your child the image will appear to have a slightly different color tone depending upon the kind of light it is taken in.

You may have noticed this yourself without really ever paying any attention to it. You may have observed, for instance, that the light given off from regular light bulbs appears more yellow than the light which streams in from outside. And other sources of light — like candle light and fluorescent lighting — certainly give off very different colors of light than sunlight or ordinary light bulbs.

Photographers and scientists have gone to the trouble of cataloging the different color temperatures given off by various light sources. Higher temperatures appear warmer, or slightly reddish, while cooler light sources tend to add a blue tone to your pictures. It is not at all unlike the way a flame has different colors at its outside than in the center of the flame. Why? Because those different parts of the flame are at different temperatures.

Lets look at the color temperatures of several different light sources:

• Candlelight – 2000 degrees Kelvin;
• Sunset – 3000 degrees Kelvin;
• Tungsten light – 3200 degrees Kelvin;
• Fluorescent light – 5000 degrees Kelvin;
• Daylight – 5500 degrees Kelvin;
• Camera flash – 5600 degrees Kelvin.

If your camera is set for one kind of light source — daylight, for instance — and you photograph your child who has been illuminated by a very different temperature of light — such as tungsten — the resulting image will not reflect the true colors in the photograph. What should be white will turn out looking a little reddish. This is why you need to be able to correct your images with white balance setting changes. Ordinarily, we don’t notice this ourselves, because the human brain is very good at interpreting what the eye sees. Our brain adjusts for different color temperatures so that the white almost always looks right, no matter what color of light we see our subject in. Of course, cameras are not quite that smart, and that’s why we need to adjust our camera for white balance.

The white balance setting on your camera allows you to pick out exactly what the color temperature of the scene you plan to photograph is. In most cases, your camera can automatically adjust to conditions. If need be, however, you can do it yourself. You will know that you need to adjust the white balance on your camera if your pictures routinely come out shifted to the blue or red end of the color spectrum. If your whites are not white — in other words, your camera doesn’t do a good job of correcting white balance — then you need to do it yourself.

A word of caution here. If you get into the habit of manually adjusting the white balance, remember to reset the white balance to auto when you’re done with each shoot. Otherwise, you might forget that your camera is balanced for fluorescent light when you shoot outdoors, and you wind up with very strange results.

Adjusting White Balance Presets

Most digital cameras will let you choose from a small collection of white balance presets. In addition to automatic white balance selection, your camera probably includes white balance settings for conditions like incandescent light, fluorescent light, an external flash unit, and cloudy or overcast days.

Choosing a White Balance Preset

The camera shooting techniques for changing your white balance setting varies from camera to camera, but the process is typically fairly simple. For the specifics on your camera model, check your camera’s users guide. In general though, this is the process:

• Turn your camera on and set it to its normal mode. If your camera has a separate manual control, choose this instead;
• Press the menu button on your camera so that you see a set of menus on the LCD display;
• Scroll until you find the option for setting white balance;
• Find the lighting condition that best represents your current conditions;
• Choose that option;
• Press menu again to turn off the menu, then take your photograph.

You can see an example of the menu setting in the image on the right.

Measuring White Balance Yourself

Sometimes, if you’re in a tricky lighting situation, such as a room that has both incandescent light and candlelight, you may need to set the white balance manually based upon the actual lighting conditions in the room. This may seem complicated, but it’s really not that hard.

Before you start, you will simply need one additional item: a white surface that the camera can use to set the white balance. Typically, you can get by with a small square of white poster board or typing paper. Or, you may want to choose a white balance lens cap disk that you can carry in your camera case. To order yours, just click on the image of the disk pictured here. However, this is for a 72mm lens, so remember to order for the size of lens that you have.

To set the white balance yourself, follow these steps:

• Ask your child to hold the white card with white side facing you. Make sure the card is where you’re actually going to take the photograph, so you are measuring the actual light as it will be in your scene.
• Turn on your camera and set it to the record mode.
• Activate the menu system on your LCD display.
• Once again, find the white balance controls in your menu.
• Scroll through the white balance options until you find the option to record it yourself. Select this option.
• You should now see an option on the LCD display directing you to photograph a white object. Compose your scene so that the white card  fills the frame.
• Take a picture and exit the menu system.
• Choose the exposure you just took, and set your camera to “custom white balance.”

The camera will now expose any pictures you take using this new white balance setting. Be sure to reset the white balance back to automatic when you’re done taking these pictures; otherwise, you may try taking pictures a day or two later in very different lighting conditions and wind up with some very bizarre results because the white balance setting is completely wrong.

So remember, learn these camera shooting techniques of how to correct your images with white balance, and the photographs of your children will be consistently better and more pleasing to the eye.

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