Tuesday 22 November 2011

Balancing act


Experimenting with white balance in class this week... I used my 50mm prime lens to photograph a simple plastic cup on a pale grey desk at f/1.8 on aperture priority (ISO 200).

Oddly, my auto white balance (AWB) produces a desaturated image; almost black and white:

AWB
I then toggled the white balance presets to see what effect this had on the image:

Daylight
Shade  
Cloudy
Tungsten light
Fluorescent light
Flash
Custom

Bearing in mind the harsh fluorescent lighting in our classroom, it's strange that the most realistic capture (in my eyes) was taken with my (usually horrible) on-camera flash. The tungsten light setting creates a very 'cool' image and the fluorescent setting creates a similar effect to AWB.

2 comments:

Digital Literacy said...

The beauty of white balance. How are your project ideas coming along? Are you going to start on a couple of themes then see where it leads. Like the photos from the last post.

Unknown said...

Coming along ok - have just posted my statement of intent about my first project (reportage portraiture) - could you let me know what you think? I'm hoping to start it over the Christmas break... not sure about my second theme at the moment - I'm thinking either composite portraiture (but worried it'll be too much for me to do ten shots) or street photography in the NQ...