Twelve weeks to better photography: week three

Woohoo... chuggin' right along, aren't we?

Lesson three is all about light. I don't know anything about light, in terms of photography, other than I hate using the flash. This was a great lesson focusing on how to set your Custom White Balance. If you're anything like me, before you read this lesson you were like "custom what what?" So I was excited to learn something new this week... especially if it meant learning how to take pictures with better lighting without using the flash.

Basically if you set your camera to AWB your camera will select what it thinks is white. So in a room where there is not a lot of natural light and you are having to use artificial lighting, your pictures will come across orangey and have a yellow cast to them. This is where learning to set your white balance comes into play. White balance is simply a fancy way of setting the color temperature of your image. The human eye is very adept at compensating for color changes in light and allowing us to view light in a very large spectrum. Most film cameras handle white balance in the film itself and you simply purchase film to match the lighting situation. Camera sensors, however, are not quite as intelligent, and they must be told what color the light is for a given situation in order to compensate for that color. To help with this, digital cameras come with some pre-set white balance settings such as Auto (AWB), Daylight, and Tungsten, among others. Properly setting your white balance for your lighting situation will greatly increase the impact of your photos and decrease the amount of time you spend editing them.

This weeks challenge was to take 3 pictures. First one with the AWB setting, second with the Tungsten setting, then the third you would set your own custom white balance. And without further ado... here's my pictures:

{AWB setting}
{Tungsten setting}
{Custom White Balance}

A HUGE difference, right? It's not always the most convenient thing to carry around a big piece of white paper in order to set my custom white balance every time I'm out taking pictures, so that's why the camera has lots of different settings for you to choose from, instead of always defaulting to the auto white balance. But for the important pictures, you'll definitely see me sportin' a big piece of white paper. :)

I am seriously loving these lessons and seeing all of my other "classmates" pictures too! To see their pictures, go to "our host" Meredith's blog and see her post along with everyone else's!