White Balance is an important part of photography that people sometimes neglect to take into account.  Put simply the reason we adjust white balance is to get the colours in our images as accurate as possible.

The naked eye won’t notice these slight changes in colour, but although our cameras are pretty damn smart, they sometimes don’t have the capabilities of making these adjustments automatically- it might need a little bit of help to get it spot on.  In cooler light, blue or green, you may need to tell the camera to warm things up a bit and in warmer light, yellow or orange, you may need to tell it to cool the colour down.

Many DSLR cameras have special presets meaning that you can adjust the white balance really easily.  Below are the settings on my Nikon camera:

Auto – this is where the camera makes a best guess on a shot by shot basis. It generally is pretty good and can quite accurately estimate the colour and temperature, however for trickier lights I find it struggles.

Tungsten – this mode is usually symbolized with a little bulb and is for shooting indoors, especially under bulb lighting. It generally cools down the colors in photos.

Fluorescent – this compensates for the ‘cool’ light of fluorescent light and will warm up your shots  Really good for artificial lighting such as those horrible strip lights you get in certain places like schools.

Direct Sunlight – This is basically a ‘normal’ white balance setting.  It generally will make the light slightly warmer.

Cloudy – this setting generally warms things up a touch more than ‘direct sunlight’ mode.

Flash – the flash of a camera can be quite a cool light so in Flash WB mode you’ll find it warms up your shots a touch.

Shade – the light in shade is generally cooler (bluer) than shooting in direct sunlight so this mode will warm things up slightly.

It is definitely worth playing around with the white balance settings and not just keeping it on auto as you may find that you like some of the results more.  I shot my little piggy here at around 3pm in the afternoon in the house with a window behind me.

While the ‘Auto’ setting is ok, I much prefer the Fluorescent setting, it just makes the photo slightly warmer and more appealing.  This is just an example but I have seen many shots that would have looked so much nicer if the white balance wasn’t set to auto.  Auto is ok and good for snapshots, but if you want to get more creative with your photography then it is definitely worth having a play round with it.  Be brave and take it off auto!

Access your white balance menu by going into your camera’s menu settings.  The settings available will differ from camera to camera but just have a play around with it and try it out in different lights when you have a bit of time.  You will be amazed the difference it can make to your photos.

So here is my guide below to the main buttons and functions on most cameras- I have left some of the more unique buttons that are specifically for certain makes of camera until another post.  Most of the things I have pointed out here will be on most DSLR’s- although the pictures or buttons may look slightly different.

1.  One of the most important parts of your camera- the lens.  With DSLR’s you can change the lens.  The one on my camera is the 18-55 kit lens but we will be talking about different types of lens in the next few weeks.

2.  This is another important part of the camera- the shutter-release button, pretty fundamental in taking a photo!

Now I am going to talk about the mode dial- the icons may vary but most DSLR’s will have the same modes.

3.  Auto- In full auto mode the camera selects all the settings for you, it is the easiest to use if you are not confident in knowing how to set up the camera to take a photo.  However with auto mode you won’t be able to get the creative control that you would if you put the camera on manual mode.  The camera will select all the settings based on the scene that it detects in front of the lens.  You may be able to do things like turn the automatic flash off but other than that you don’t get an input.  You can get some really great shots on auto so don’t be afraid of using it if you want an easy option.

4. Programmed Auto- On the programmed auto mode the camera still selects the aperture (f-stop) and the shutter speed (more about these in another post)  so that the exposure is correct, but you can chose from a number of different combinations of both that will product optimal exposure and therefore the best photo. It is worth using for people who want to take  a quick snapshot but still have a slight element of control.

5.  Shutter priority Auto- This basically means that you select the shutter speed (ISO) yourself and the camera selects the f-stop (Aperture) in order to achieve the best results.   When taking shots of fast moving objects, e.g animals or transport you would use this mode or when you want to use a long shutter speed at night time in order to blur motion. e.g car lights.  When you want to photography fast moving objects or create motion blur, the shutter speed is the most important thing to consider.

6.  Aperture priority Auto- This is the other way round to Shutter Priority- so you select the aperture (f-stop) and the camera will automatically select the shutter speed in order to give the best exposure.   This mode is really useful when you want to maximise or minimise depth of field.  Simply put depth of field is the range of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear sharp.  You would use this for portrait photography or perhaps product photography too. We will do a whole post on Aperture but basically the lower the f-stop number the wider the hole and therefore the more light that enters the camera.

7.  Manual-  This means that everything is down to you.  You control everything about the exposure, the aperture, the shutter speed and other aspects as well.  However just because it is completely manual doesn’t mean that you need to know everything.  In fact some of my favourite photos have been down to playing around with the manual setting on my camera.  It can also be a great way of learning about exactly what shutter speed and aperture do to your photographs and how they effect them as you can see from your camera’s LCD screen exactly what settings you used to achieve the result.

8.  Effects-  Not all cameras will have this setting, but essentially it is just a way of doing photo effects on your camera if you wanted too, rather than doing it in post shot editing.

9.  Macro-  Macro photography is one of my favourite types of photography- basically it just means close up.  Generally using this means that the background will blur so they don’t compete for attention with your main subject- e.g flowers photos or close up product photos.

10.  Sports- Sport mode works a lot like shutter priority mode. i.e you would use it to freeze moving objects such as athletics or car racing.  However in this mode the shutter speed is set high by default.

11.  Child- Child mode works in the same way to portrait mode but it also has a faster shutter speed in order to stop blur from a moving and wriggly child!  Clothing, toys and other backgrounds have slightly more vivid colours.

12.  Landscape-  This mode is a lot like Aperture but this time with a smaller aperture so you have a greater depth of field and therefore the whole image is a lot sharper.  The smaller the aperture, the more of the area that will be in focus.  But remember a small aperture means a larger f-stop number.  Confusing I know but we will talk about this a lot over the next few months.

13.  Portrait- This works in the exact opposite way to Landscape mode- it is set to a wider aperture therefore your subject will be sharp and the background will be a lot softer.

14.  Scenes- Again not all cameras will have this function but basically this can help create other auto based scenes such as party/indoor, night portrait etc.

15.  Auto No Flash- This is again something that not all cameras will have but it is essentially auto with the flash off.

So there you have it.  The main modes of your camera and what you can do with them.  These will be the same on most cameras so hopefully they will have help demystify them a little bit.  Over the next coming months we will develop these ideas further.  In the meantime hopefully it will encourage you to take your camera off auto, even if it is just only slightly off!