whats that about white balance? #mamarazzi #photography101

I went for a super 4oth birthday lunch a few weeks ago and I had a conversation with a friend about cameras, her camera in particular and she was saying how she was really frustrated with her pictures that she was taking when she was indoors. We talked around what settings she was using and what lens, then i said

‘have you tried changing your white balance?’ – and then a little lightbulb may have just gone on.

Its a very very simple thing and yet it can be so effective in changing the look of your image.

What is white balance?

It all boils down to the concept of colour temperature. Color temperature is a way of measuring the quality of a light source.

The unit for measuring this ratio is in degree Kelvin (K). A light with higher color temperature (i.e., larger Kelvin value) has “more” blue lights than a light with lower color temperature (i.e., smaller Kelvin value). Thus, a cooler (resp., warmer) light has a higher (resp., lower) color temperature. But we don’t need to get too in depth do we!!

This is a few screenshots of how you can change your white balance…

nikon display

Canon display

The symbols you can see are fairly self explanatory, shade, the little lightbulb for inside, sunshine etc etc. Its fairly easy to follow. You dont always need to swop the white balance though. Sometimes the auto white balance does a great job and others you might just want to have a play and see if it makes a difference to your shot. Here is an example of the same shot, in different white balance modes.

these two subtle difference between daylight and auto. The daylight setting adds more creamy, golden colours…

the other thing to remember is what WB works in what environment.

For example if you are in a really creamy, orangey environment like a pub or a restaurant with lots of artifical lighting then tungsten might be a good white balance to use.

But if you are outside, be careful as it will turn everything blue!! you can see here i have changed the WB to tungsten (thats the little bulb) on the top picture, it looks cold and not at all right.

But inside it can get rid of some of those really orange and yellow tones that can come from house lighting and also from large bits of dark wood that reflect the light coming into a room onto anything that you are shooting. Especially if you are struggling with getting the pictures to look half decent indoors sometimes adjusting the white balance might just help. T

These shots of the cakes, i changed the WB (you can do it in a post processing software like photoshop if you shoot in RAW) and i it has taken some of the creamy gold out of the shots,which is more true to the actual cake.

Of course you can always set your own white balance and that would be a custom white balance.

You can do this by telling your camera what white is. This is easy and don’t be put off by fancy white balance gizmos. All you need is a bit of white paper. Hold it in front of your camera and correctly expose for the shot, keeping your white bit of paper in the centre. Like this.. The little grid at the bottom of the screen with the +1/+2 on it your little marker needs to be in the middle.

then go to the custom white balance but of your menu and press set and it will probably ask you if you want it to use the data from this image for white balance, say YES!

It can make a real difference! look at these two!

Very important thing to remember is that if you are using custom white balance you have to re-set every time your lighting changes, make sense?

Go on, go and have a play with white balance and make sure you have stab at custom white balance and let me know how you get on!

Follow:

So what else do you do? #motivationalmonday

This week has been an all round rubbish week that has left me feeling like, out of all the ‘roles’ i have in my life, im seem to not be doing any of them well. *sigh*

This week I had an interview, it was at the place i work for a job that i had about 2 years ago and then lost through the delightful NHS cutbacks and is now being offered again…its a long story, a long, boring and miserable story that i won’t bore you with. But the interview was this week and it wasn’t the nicest experience ive ever had i have to say, runs up close to root canal or another such painful event.

My interview was delayed by over an hour and then during my presentation prep a fire alarm joined in and banged around in my head for half of the time. Nerves jangled somewhat i stumbled through a presentation based on a practically impossible scenario and then was asked a bunch of questions. A few of which i did sort of okay on i think and some i totally BOMBED. You know, in the, ‘shall i just get my coat’ bomb.

But there was one question that just irritated me….and continues to which is why im moaning about it here. I was asked what extra CPD (thats continuous professional development) i had done in the past two years. Extra, as in, extra to the standard stuff we have to do to maintain professional registration. I answered with a few things then she looked at me, i think with a little sneer (though i may have imagined that) and said ‘and what else have you done?’

hmmmmm…just let me think a bloody minute. I dont know…maybe..raise five kids, turn up for every single shift i’m supposed to regardless of sleepless nights, vomiting bugs, stressed out husbands, broken cars, car accidents or snow with a bloody smile on my face. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Of course i know she wasn’t asking me about what else i do outside of work. But it may be a mad crazy thought but your life outside of work can effect your ability to throw huge amounts of commitment and time at your work. Its a tricky balance for all us working mums i guess.

It was the only question that actually upset me, how funny is that. Even the ones that resulted in a ‘nothing happenin’ here’ look on my face as mortifying as that was..i can shake that off. But what pisses me off is that some people don’t realise that actually just showing up with your game face on takes all you have on some days and sometimes that is just all you can give.

I wanted to shout the above tirade in her face and see what happened but of course i didnt.

and i didnt get the job.

cherry on top  😉

So in a bid to lighten up this post and because what follows demonstrates a little bit of ‘what else i do’

Here come the girls ….two of my bunch. Just hanging out with the girls while we get frozen by the spring 😉

This is a little bit of what else I have done.

 

She is telling me in that bottom picture ‘ there are no monsters here mummy’ – just in case you were wondering!

My giveaway this week is another lovely sunshine box of goodies from LUSH. You don’t have to leave a comment this week if you don’t fancy it but if you do that would be nice. Remember to come back next week and check who snagged the prize!

Jane Greenfield you win the Rob Cowen signed book please get in touch! Congratulations!
themondayclub

Motivational Monday

 

 

 

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Follow:

#silentsunday

 

SocialPix - LoveAllBlogs

Team Lloyd

 

Follow:

Pick me up… #flowertherapy

 It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, it matters how many times you get back up.

— autor nieznany

Follow:

The trick to backlighting your subject.

Is that an angel before me?

or is it just some very clever back lighting?

I was musing on this, this evening. Possibly because there is still snow on the ground here…*eye roll* and i so often associate this sort of light with those lovely warm evenings in the summer. *sigh*

I miss the sun…

Anyway I really love this sort of light but it can turn out really really naff. It is a really beautiful but it can be difficult to use.

Ever managed it? Taken a shot of your kid with their back to the sun and their hair lights up like a halo? Its lovely right? ah the beauty of backlighting.

and it doesn’t need to be on kids or people!….

 

But you have to be careful. Shooting into the sun can throw your camera a curve ball from the point of view of what it ‘sees’ as the light and you camera is likely to meter for the sun and then you subject is going to be dark..really dark.

So here are a few tips for getting that sweet backlighting.

1. Try to shoot either early morning or later afternoon/evening. This is why i love the summer evenings as you can be out in the warm in the gorgeous golden light.

2. When shooting try and meter from your subject. On a dslr you could try spot metering, so that you are telling the camera the exact spot you want it to meter for the light and not asking it to take a broad reading of the light. You may still end up with your subject having a dark face. In this situation you might want to bring a reflector into the face of your subject and you don’t need anything posh to do that you can use a bit of white card or paper. You just need to reflect some light into the face to brighten it up a bit. You can use your exposure compensation also to make sure that you are not going to end up with a dark subject.

3. If possible try and have a darker background behind your subject, as you can see in the first shot, my son is in front of a darker, green backdrop of a local park. He is therefore separated by the sun on his head from the background. If the background was white then there would be no difference between his head and the background if that makes sense.

4 . You may end up with a bit of your background blown out a bit…with this sort of lighting though it is actually quite nice and like the point before as long as you are not loosing your subject into the background, this is a particular thing to take care with fair haired kids.

5.If you don’t want sun flare in the image put your subject in front of something that blocks it off, you will still get the lovely glow of the sun in the image.

So when we next actually get some sun. Fancy going out an giving it a try?

 

 


Follow: