Stunning Portraits: Manipulating White Balance

A Post By: Alex Smith

"a little review of white balance is in order as this technique involves a basic understanding of the topic. Every light that we take photographs in, whether it be an incandescent light bulb indoors or the bright shining sun outdoors, is made of of a different spectrum of colors. Now when we look at objects under these light sources with our own eyes, we take it for granted that our vision compensates for all the different color casts of these lights amazingly well and we get a pretty standard representation of all colors in the scene. Basically, when we look at something that is supposed to be white in varying light conditions, our brain interprets the situation and our eye sees it as white. The camera works a little bit different.

The camera sees color in a much different way and has a less sophisticated way to interpret colors under different lighting situations. This is where the white balance setting helps us out. Many photographers that I know tend to keep there cameras white balance on the automatic setting. With the automatic white balance setting, your camera searches for a white reference point in the scene you are shooting. Then all of the other colors are set to this reference point. Therefore, your camera tries to make an educated guess to ensure the colors are represented correctly in your photo. The problem is that sometimes the camera is wrong and we have to bypass the automatic settings and go to that very scary place of setting the white balance in a more manual way, either by using the preset settings that the camera contains or even, heaven forbid, we might have to use some sort of white balancing device to help set our colors. There is a wealth of knowledge on this subject and I encourage you to pursue this topic at your leisure. You can also click on the following links for a decent explanation and breakdown of white balance (DPS-Intro to White Balance and White Balance in Digital Photography). The take home message is simply that we have to be conscious of how our camera views color and understand that we might have to give it some help by changing our camera’s white balance setting.

Now that we have introduced the concept of white balance let’s turn the tables on this subject and manipulate it to create some drama and eloquence in a portrait. The lighting setups for these portraits can be seen in the following diagrams"

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