Week 2 - White Balance

        I figured I would start talking about something that almost ALL cameras have the ability to change....which is changing your white balance.  No matter what your camera (cell phone, point and shoot camera, DSLR camera) you will be able to change your white balance....you might not be able to set your custom white balance but you can adjust the white balance to get different ways of expressing your photos.
       I never truly thought & understood how important white balance is to photographs.  When you take a pictures you can change the whole mood and how the picture turns out just by changing the white balance.  Also by changing the white balance and making sure you have the correct exposure (another week) you can drastically improve your photos.   The nice thing is most cameras allow you control and you don't need a fancy dancy camera to do it. 

Most cameras have some standard white balance that when you go into a setting and don't have enough time to set your camera for a custom white balance you can usually pick from these and your pictures will come out fine.  You want to make sure you understand how they all work so that way you can just think.....well I'm inside my lights are on I should change my white balance to tungsten. 

Auto -- The camera will choose what it thinks is the best for the scene.....usually if you don't have time to think and you are going to be in and out of building and outdoors.....just keep it on Auto!

Daylight -- Best for Clear skies and some puffy clouds! Also if you are indoors and aren't using any artificial lights you can sometimes see if daylight will work for you!

Cloudy -- Best for Cloudy skies!  This will give you a warm look because when you are taking pictures outside when it's cloudy if you shot on auto or daylight more often then not you will have cooler pictures and it just won't feel the same.

Shade -- Best for when you are in the shade....it helps give you a warm look because (duh) you are in the shade and don't have the sun to help warm up the picture

Tungsten -- That handy dandy light bulb in your house....well sometimes it helps if you change your white balance so that you can be inside and it runs more cool than if you were to use daylight.

Fluorescent -- Those wonderful light that are in most offices.....you want to use fluorescent lighting rather than tungsten because both bulbs light the room differently.

Flash -- When you use your automatic or external flash....set your white balace to flash....it's very similar to daylight but not!  (Not gonna explain unless someone wants an explaination.....this is just basic easy explaination!)

Custom WB -- You can set and adjust your WB....well at least on my camera you.....maybe not on your phone.  Having a Custom White balance means that you take a picture of something gray and then set your WB in your camera....every camera is different so I can't tell you how to do this....I'll show you on my camera how I do it but it would probably be better if you grabbed your handy dandy owners manual and checked out their advice.

When you are changing your white balance just make sure to look around and just check out the lighting source.....you'll be amazed at the difference you will see!!  Also once you understand how white balance effects your pictures you can use it to help change the way a person might view your photograph.  Say that it's early morning and you want it to seem like it early evening.....you could switch your white balance to shade or cloudy and get a very warm picture instead of the blues breaking up.

For my examples I actually used a previous picture I had taken in Raw (more on that later) and because it was in Raw I was able to quick look at the picture and change the white balance in photoshop so I could give you some examples outside (because most likely I am not gonna go outside to take pictures in the North Dakota winter! Brr!!!!  Anyways as you can see you get either warmer or cooler pictures when you use the various white balances.  I think my favorite picture (just with changing the white balance) is between the Shade white balance and the Custom White balance.  The lighting is just a little bit more the right shades and so forth in both of those!!  I could do more to make the picture my favorite but because we are only playing with white balance I'm just showing you the potential of just doing a little thing in you camera and how it can effect your whole picture!

This week's challenge is to play with your white balance. Figure out how white balance works on your camera and just take pictures of the same object using the various white balance presets that your camera has. Also take your object inside, outside, in full sun, when it's cloudy, in the shade and see how things improve or don't improve using your white balance. Be observant and become aware of how things change.