Have you ever taken a photo and then looked at it only to realise that it has a yellowy or blue tint to it?  However when taking the photo the light and the scene looked completely normal?  The reason for this is that images taken in different lights have a different colour or temperature to them.  E.g if you take a photo in artificial lighting it may come across as having a slightly blueish tint.  There is a large range of temperatures and colours and this range is known as the Kelvin Scale.

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.

We’re all about giving you tips and pointers to improve your photography on I Heart Snapping, and we’ve loved all the great feedback to all our photography related posts and people wanting to be involved with I Heart My Edit. But we also want to showcase some real talents; so we will be introducing you to some lovely photographers and asking them to share their tips and let us all know how they go started and what they love about doing what they do.

For our first ever ‘Leave It To The Pros’ post we have Chloe Bridge. Some of you may know her from Chloe Witters where she blogs all about her life with her adorable little boy Arlo. If you haven’t already done so, then check it out. Expect lots of lovely photographs! Chloe’s photography on her blog have launched a whole new career for her, as she has recently ventured into the world of portrait photography by setting up her own business Chloe Bridge Photography. She very kindly agreed to take some time out of being a mummy and running her own photography business, to let us ask her some questions. So here she is…

First off, can you tell us a bit about you and how you started out in photography?

I am a family and lifestyle photographer based in London. I started my own photography business just a couple of months ago and I’m so pleased to be able to do what I love and, at the same time, call it a career.

I’ve always been interested in photography. I remember the excitement of getting my first film camera when I was 7. Just before my 18th birthday, I announced that I wanted to be a photographer, and so my uncle very generously gave me his old SLR as my birthday present. I learnt so much by playing around with that camera. It served me well throughout university, and I dabbled with a bit of event photography for the University newspaper.

After I gained my English degree, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in photography. I luckily landed a job at a family portrait studio and gained invaluable training and practise with posing, lighting, and working with children of all ages. After that job, I moved into the post production side of photography and worked for one of London’s leading retouching houses.

Portrait photography has always been my ‘thing’. I just love the challenge of nailing that perfect expression and capturing each person’s unique personality. I started a blog whilst on maternity leave, a place where I could share the hundreds of photos I was taking of my son. Off the back of the blog, I started getting requests from friends to photograph their families. More referrals came from friends of friends after seeing my images, and my photography business was born from there.

What is in your kit bag? What camera(s) do you use? What accessories wouldn’t you be without?

I use a Canon 40d. My favourite lenses for portraits are my 50mm 1.8 and 28mm 1.8. My not-so-secret weapons are a white noise machine for newborn shoots, and bubbles for toddlers and older babies.

What do you love most about photography?

Images play such a huge part in preserving memories. A cherished photo lasts longer than a lifetime and will be passed down through generations to come. I can’t think of a way to write this without sounding incredibly cheesy, but to play a part in creating those treasured family memories is pretty awesome.

Can you tell us how you like to edit your photographs? What software do you use? Are there any particular things that you like doing with photographs?

I use a mixture of Lightroom and Photoshop when editing. Lightroom is my absolute favourite (if I could marry a software program…), but there are some things that can only be done in Photoshop. I like to edit my images in a clean, bright style, especially with babies and families – timeless classics that won’t date with age.

Which blogs do you think use fantastic photography?

Gregarious Peach - http://www.gregariouspeach.com/

Georgia is an Australian photographer and founder of the popular Facebook group ‘Documenting Delight’ – my go-to place to see some excellent photo-a-day child photography.  Georgia is brilliant at incorporating stories and conversations alongside her images, in doing so she captures some fantastic images of her two children.

Enjoying the Small Things - http://www.kellehampton.com/

Kelle lives in Florida with her two highly photogenic daughters. I found this hugely popular blog when I was pregnant with my son and I’ve been addicted ever since. My gosh does this lady have a picture perfect life (all down to her amazing photography!)

I read Inspire Me Baby and Let the Kids Dress Themselves for great tips and inspiration for family shoots.
http://inspiremebaby.com/
http://letthekids.com/

Share your three favourite photographs and why you love them. (We appreciate that it’s hard to choose only three!!!)

My favourites change every week, so this was a really tough one!

1. This is one of my favourite shots from the photoshoot that launched my photography business. As that shoot was such a landmark for me, I think it will always hold a place in my favourites.

2. This image of a yawning six day old newborn never fails to make me smile

3. Lastly, I couldn’t help including a shot of my own boy. I took this when he was 14 months old, and it perfectly sums him up at that age – headores his trains.

What tips can you give to our readers?

One comment I hear all the time is, “I’d love to learn more about my camera, but I haven’t got a clue how to use it in manual mode”.  If that sounds like you, then this is my advice:

Read up on shutter speeds, aperture and ISO (this link provides a simple explanation: http://lifehacker.com/5814173/basics-of-photography-your-cameras-manual-settings), and then set yourself a challenge to take a photo every day for a set period of time. A week, a month, or even a year – the longer the better!

Not only will you get to know your camera very quickly, you will learn to see your home from a photographer’s perspective (where to get the best light at which times of day, etc), and manual mode will fast become second nature. Most important of all, it will get you in the habit of picking up your camera on a regular basis, and you will have some amazing photographic memories to show for it. I started a year long photo-a-day project in January (you can check it out on my blog: http://www.chloewitters.wordpress.com), and it’s been the best challenge I’ve ever set myself!

Great tips and food for thought. Get your cameras out people, because you won’t learn how to use them if they are safely in their camera bag.

Thank-you to Chloe for being involved and sharing her tips and beautiful favourite photographs. You can follow Chloe on Twitter as @khloeee so stop by and say hi there or on her blog.

We said it before when we were talking about giving your blog a ‘look’ and a brand image, but it doesn’t hurt to say it again. Your blog banner, or header or whatever you want to call it, is your business card. It is the first thing people will look at when they visit your blog, and a lot of people will make the decision to stay and read on or leave, completely based on your banner. The whole look of your blog is important, but the banner should tie your whole blog together and tell people what you are about in a quick and visual way.

There are a lot of beautiful banners out there, and it’s really daunting to know where to start, so today I’m going to take you through a hopefully, really simple tutorial of how to make a photo banner. I’m doing a photo banner because that’s what I do best. I use a photo banner on my own personal blog because it is the best way of telling people what I’m all about; my blog includes a lot of photos and is all about a little boy. Thats what Dear Beautiful Boy does and so that is what my banner tells you.

I use Picasa to do all my blog making and designing. Its a free download software for your computer and once you get to grips with it, it’s brilliant for creating photo banners, grab buttons (which we’ll be talking about in a few weeks) and collages. It doesn’t cost anything to give it a try, so why not download it and see what you think.

The great thing with Picasa is that making a photo banner is easy because it automatically shows you all the photos that you have saved in various folders all over your computer. So on launching the software just go to the correct folders to find the pictures you want to use in your banner.

Directly underneath where the folder name and details are, you can see a play button. Next to that is a collage button. By pressing that you go through to the collage editing part of the software and it will automatically take the photos in that folder and place them in your collage for you.

To the left hand side you will find a drop down menu which gives you a selection of different sized boards on which to arrange your pictures. At this stage it doesn’t actually matter what board you use as you will crop it later, but I like to work on a board that has the rough proportions of the finished article so that it is easier to arrange things how I would like.

On the left hand side there is also a tab entitled ‘Clips’ which allows you to add and remove photos that you would like to include. By pressing ‘Get More’ you will go back to the original screen where you selected your folder and you can select more folders of photos to include in your banner.

Then it’s simply a case of arranging the photographs as you would like them. You can resize and angle them to your hearts content. For this design I wanted the pictures the same size and an equal distance apart.

You can change the background colour of your board here too. For a clean look on your blog, it’s a good idea to make sure this background colours is either the same as the background of your blog, or a contrasting colour to make it stand out. When you are happy with your background and photo arrangement you simply click ‘Create Collage’.

This takes you to a different editing screen when you can edit the whole collages as if it were one image, but you can always go back and change the collage around if you need to by clicking ‘Edit Collage’ in the top left hand corner. Once through to the editing stage you need to trim down and tidy up any uneven edges on your banner, using the crop tool. You can also add text and retouch anything you aren’t quite happy with.

You can manually decide the proportions by eye or you can use a preset crop, but with this design I needed to chop off the excess background board to the right of the design.

I left a space at the bottom of my banner to add my blog title. So you simply use the text tool to select your font, size and colour and then move the text into position. Then click ‘Apply’ to make those changes to your banner. The final thing left to do is to export your finished banner to a folder on your computer by clicking on ‘Export’ at the bottom of the screen.

This window will pop up and you need to resize the image to however many pixels wide your blog is. This will differ from one blog design to the next, but is generally somewhere between 800 and 1200 pixels. You can check this first or export a few versions with different pixel sizes and see which one fits best.

And voilà! One simple and easy photo banner for your blog. I would like to apologise for the unexciting and unoriginal banner and blog title I’ve used in my example. It’s simply to give you an idea of how you might go about making a photo banner for your blog.

And remember that this is just a basic idea. Once you’ve got to grips with using Picasa in this way, the restrictions are only on what your head can come up with. Try more pictures, or less pictures. Text at the top, the side, over the pictures, in the middle of a circle of pictures. It’s just a case of letting your creativity flow. You could change your title font and back ground colour each month or season for a different look. You can swap pictures in and out to keep it up to date.

Just keep in mind at all times what your blog is about and how your banner represents that. This is probably one of the reasons why photo banners are so versatile, because you can simply include some of your best blog pictures and you are automatically representing the blog as a whole in your banner. Just take the I Heart Snapping banner; it tell you what we’re all about.

It’s Friday, it’s nearly the weekend, which means it is time for our new weekly feature on I Heart Snapping- ‘I Heart My Snap.’    It is all about sharing the love- we will start off by sharing some links that have particularly caught our attention this week- whether it is a blog post, a product, a review or even just a blog we love.  After that it is time for our new linky- I Heart My Snap.

There are so many photography linky’s out there at the moment, which no doubt we will be talking about over the coming weeks, but we wanted to go back to basics and to share the love.  ’I Heart My Snap’ is so simple- there are no themes, or no entry conditions- all you have to do is share a blog post (or instagram or flickr photo) that has some photos or a photo on that you are particularly proud of.  It could be a recent one, or it could be an old one- just as long as it is a great picture that means something to you.  It can be of your children, pets, partner, landscape…anything as long as you are proud of it and want to share it off.  Who knows, if we like it too it may appear on Link Love the following week?

The linky will stay open for a week, until the next Friday comes along and then I Heart My Snap will start again.  Simple.

So here is our link love for the week…

Our first link isn’t a new one but it is someone you just have to follow on instagram.  Icklebabe’s instagram feed really brightens up my day- her photos are so creative and beautiful, they really bring a smile to my face.

Helen from The Crazy Kitchen has written a really informative tutorial on photo collages on PicMonkey- perfect if you need to have a go before they officially bring out a collage section.

Our very own Lucy has a wonderful new linky on her blog called See it Snap It Love It…it is perfect for those who want to take part in a photography linky that challenges them to take photos- this week’s theme was ‘Red,’ and I still can’t think of a good idea!

I have found a new blog recently- the blog is very new but really is so pretty and worth a look- go and visit Capture by Lucy.

Finally, as we love pretty blogs.. we love Love From Mummy’s new blog design…ok we are slightly biased but it is lovely!

Do you have a photo or photo’s you want to share with us?  If so link up below.  And please make sure to grab our badge and put it on your post.  We can’t wait to see the photos that make you proud.