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I'm pretty new to photography although I use images all the time in my job as a professional web designer. One year ago I decided that if I wanted to make my web pages look good I had to go out there and start taking photos and was hooked immediately!
During the course of the last year, my learning curve has been pretty steep, reading articles, taking shots and generally being a bore to my friends. I pretty soon realised that if I wanted to take great shots I would have to look at all the angles, not just the composition but all the tech stuff behind.
You're probably wondering what all this has to do with white balance. It's amazing but the human eye has a remarkable ability to adjust to different light conditions. Not only do our eyes have built-in auto-focus system and auto-exposure capability, but we also have automatic colour balance built into our brains. A white object will appear white to us whether viewed in sunlight or under overcast skies, or indoors under incandescent or fluorescent lighting that is because the human brain has the capability to compensate for such changes in perceived colour.
In the digital camera the sensor array has to be adjusted so that white appears white under various lighting conditions. The perceived colour of white often changes based on ambient conditions - outdoor (sunlight which is bluish) is perceived to be cooler, indoor (tungsten which is reddish) is perceived to be warmer and under fluorescent light it is perceived to be greener. The ratio of the amount of blue light to the amount of red light; is known as Colour Temperature The unit for measuring this ratio is in degree Kelvin . I've learnt that only if the white balance is set correctly can the colours be captured correctly and even though I can adjust the white balance in photoshop afterwards, this will not always give such good results.
On most digital cameras the white balance setting defaults to "Auto" mode. I used this setting for a long time and found that it works in most situations but is not very accurate. To achieve greater accuracy you need to go into the menu mode and set the appropriate preset white balance setting for your shot which could be "sunny", "cloudy", "flash", "incandescent", "fluorescent", "night shot" etc.
Setting the white balance incorrectly will not only make the white appear bluish or reddish (depending on the setting) but will make all the other colours in the image to be rendered incorrectly as well. For example, if you set the white balance to "sunny" and take the photo indoors in "incandescent" light the picture will have predominantly reddish cast overall, on the other hand if the white balance is set to "incandescent" and the picture is taken outdoors, it will have a predominantly bluish cast overall.
This is great when you take abstract shots as you can force a colour cast and get all sorts of nice effects as I did when I took the winning photo of the paper spiral. This was taken in sunlight with the white balance set to "incandescent" to get the nice subtle bluish tones which I then enhanced in Photoshop.
Photography is a great adventure and I'm going to go on experimenting with new techniques and just having fun.
[Inspiring Digital Photography Articles]
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