Once upon a time people shot pictures using a chemical process called film. If you wanted to alter the white balance you either screwed a colour correction filter onto the lens before taking the picture or you used a different film that was balanced for "Tungsten" (for indoors) rather than "Daylight". Because both of these steps are somewhat inconvenient most non-professional photographers simply didn't. They shot everything on daylight film. This is the equivalent of setting your digital camera white balance to "Sunny" instead of "Auto". Guess what, lots of great pictures were taken!
Different flavours of light have different characters to them. Most can be pleasant (apart from flourescents, which often look green and unpleasant). Auto white balance will attempt to turn all of these light sources to "white" and is a leading cause of photos looking sterile and boring.
Here is an example of one of the "warmest" light sources commonly encountered -- candlelight. But this very warmth is what makes things in candlelight so beautiful and warm and comforting to behold. The daylight balanced film used here has fully captured that warmth.
When I do shoot my digital camera I almost always use daylight white balance rather than auto. I can't remember when I last changed that setting. And the digital pictures almost always look great in every light. And gone are the days when two photos taken seconds apart look completely different thanks to auto white balance making a different white balance "guess" each time.
No comments:
Post a Comment