As the winter months approach, you might begin to see the first traces of snow falling around your hometown. If not, they can’t be too far away and, although it signals the end of shorts and t-shirts, it doesn’t mean there still won’t be plenty of beautiful naturescapes to photograph.
That being said, winter photos present a different challenge than what you’d typically encounter during the other three seasons. The presence of snow on the ground means that the avid photographer will have to adjust his or her technique slightly.
Maintaining the right white balance for your photos can be one of those winter photo challenges, but white balance really shouldn’t be your biggest concern. Here are three tips to help you perfect white balance:
When you choose this setting you can select your desired white balance during the editing stage. If you shoot all of your photos in RAW, you’ll always be able to achieve the white balance you’re looking for when you go back and edit your photos.
That being said, you should be careful to remember that the RAW file actually doesn’t contain any white balance information, which can lead you to be misled by the image that appears on the screen. Your best bet is to shoot RAW using automatic white balance and confirm that the image is what you’re looking for using your camera’s LCD display.
While Kodak Gray Cards are nothing new, they’ve been serving their common purpose of getting precise colors and exposure for years. A gray card is placed in front of your camera’s light meter and it reflects the light that falls on the subject.
You take a measurement of light from the card and the card will give you the right light for your colors to fall in the right place. This is a viable white balance solution, but you should be careful to place the card at the exact same angle as the subject. If you don’t, you might not get the results you’re looking for.
Most cameras come with a set of predefined white balance options that are always at your disposal. Some examples of these white balance settings include daylight, shadow, tungsten, fluorescent, and more. In addition to these predetermined settings, you should have the option to create a custom white balance.
Different cameras have different ways of setting custom white balance, but the most common method is to take a photo and tell the camera to reference that image for the custom white balance. This gives you some creative freedom to take a photo of a colored wall and use that white balance setting for a series of photos. Trying this with different colors will help you learn a lot about how your camera works.
White balance really isn’t one of the most difficult riddles of photography to solve. However, learning more about how you can adjust white balance to different settings will ultimately help you take the type of quality photos that we all aspire to.
To learn about a few more techniques for perfecting white balance, please check out the link here.