I decided to take a quick photo of my one a day purge project(quickly taken with my phone) and after I put them together in a collage, I realized that it would make a great example for a photography subject. I thought I’d do some very basic lessons over the next few months for my Mom who is taking a special trip this year.
First thing though, my project is going well. I am currently in Connor’s room and I’m pretty sure I could find a year’s worth of items to discard in there alone. I decided to start February with some new “rules”: 5 books count as 1 item and 2 pieces of clothing count as one item.
Now onto my very basic photography lesson- white balance. This is a setting on your camera that you can adjust depending on what kind of light is on your subject. Many people will leave their camera on auto everything and not realize they can have control over this. Under your menu their should be a WB (white balance) setting that allow you to choose your setting. Another option is to adjust this in post processing. It is always better to set it in camera if you are shooting jpgs, if you are shooting in camera RAW, it isn’t as necessary, but always better to have it right while you are shooting. (And if you are shooting RAW, you probably know a thing or two about white balance!)
In the above collage, I took my photos on my carpet in my living room. The room has large windows and natural light. As you can see, the background varies quite a lot depending if it was sunny or cloudy, morning or evening, or taken with lamps on in the room. I am sure that you have seen photos where everybody looks orange or overly blue. This is a white balance issue and is very easy to adjust.
All light has different temperatures. Our eyes adjust easily to this, but a camera doesn’t always know “automatically” what temperature to choose. Candlelit photos or photos taken inside under incandescent lights may produce very warm/orange casts. Photos taken under fluorescent bulbs may be blue. Even in natural light, there is large variable between sunny and cloudy days, mid-afternoon and early evening light and even the light of winter vs. summer.
Just want to encourage you to find the white balance setting in your camera menu and learn how to adjust it according to presets. Becoming comfortable with using your camera and taking back some of the control will improve your photographs greatly and as you get use to changing it, you will see the difference in the light. You can adjust the white balance to what you wish to portray instead of using presets.
One way to practice this lesson is to take the same photo in the same light, while switching through all the presets- sunny, cloudy, shady, tungsten, fluorescent, etc and then take a look at how different each photo looks.
Hope this helps to improve your shots a little.
Thanks for the tips