Photo Challenge: White Balance

Hiya folks. Still haven’t gotten around to taking my camera to the doctor but have it on the agenda for today. Hopefully they will get the focus issue sorted asap. Still, my 50 mm seems to be the least affected so I took some time to experiment with white balance over the weekend.  You can shoot in manual with your white balance on Auto which is what I’ve done up til now. On the blog series I’m working through, 31 days to a better photo, the author works through each of the different white balance settings and how they can help bring out or help mute different colors in your photo depending on which sort of lighting you’re shooting in. 

So there is Auto which allows your camera to be the judge for which white balance you need. 

See the slight fuzziness of this photo? Gotta get this fixed!

There is incandescent which is for shooting indoors under regular light bulbs. This setting helps to cool down the yellow tones that can be present when shooting in artificial light. 

There is Flourescent which adds warm tones to the usual cool colors present when shooting in fluorescent lighting. 

There is a Direct Sunlight setting which can add a few more red tones to balance out the greens that are usually pretty vibrant when shooting in full sun. 

There is Flash which tries to add warmth to balance out the cooler blue colors that come when shooting with a flash. 

There is also a Cloudy white balance setting which adds in yellows and reds to warm up a photo in low sunlight. To me cloudy and flash look pretty similar.

The Shade white balance setting is also similar in adding warmth to lower lighting situations. 

You can also create a custom white balance which the blog series walks you through. This allows you to set the perfect balance for whatever light you are shooting in. Setting custom WB requires some additional equipment (expodisk) which I don’t own at this point, but now that I understand how important white balance is in capturing the colors and tone that you want, I will surely be investing in learning to create custom WB for certain settings. Check out My3boybarian’s post on setting custom white balance for pretty straight forward instructions. 

Here are just a few more sh.ots I took for fun while experimenting with different white balance settings. 

Shade WB setting

Fluorescent WB

Fluorescent WB

Flash WB

Flash WB

Flash WB

Auto WB

Auto WB

Auto WB

I'll hopefully get my camera fixed up soon so I can keep on learning stuff. I'm having so much fun!