Friday, January 13, 2012

White Balance

Here's another cool trick I learned in my photo class. The camera uses a function called "white balance" to determine the settings for all its colors. It's usually automatic, and more or less accurate, but you can fool the camera to produce dramatically colored photos.

In this case, I went around pointing the camera at different colors -- red, blue, green and purple -- and told the camera each one was really white. After each reset, I took a photo of a tree in front of the building where my classes are held. Pretty cool, huh?

I'm sure I won't use this trick much, but it's cool to learn how white balance works. There are situations where you'd really want to reset the white balance, if your camera isn't doing it automatically -- for example, in a room lit by fluorescent light, which registers slightly green on the color scale. Otherwise the color on your photos will be distorted by weird lighting.

Today is the last day of my class, but I signed up for another more advanced class next week, focusing on photojournalism and street photography. Should be fun!


  1. Nice shots. It would come in handy for some Pop Art shots. Maybe for some holiday pictures. Something fun. :)

    Ms. M

  2. J has to adjust his white balance when we go to hockey games, because the overabundance in white in all the shots throws everything off. So perhaps (?) the same would be true of a very snowy day, when auto settings sometimes show the snow as bluish gray.

  3. You are learning so much. How exciting!