![]() ![]() To set your camera’s white balance you must consider the "color temperature" of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light. The white balance not only changes throughout the day as the sun goes from the horizon to the center of the sky, but you will also find different white balance on a cloudy day or in deep shadow or shadows. When using flash it becomes important to choose your own white balance because the white balance of the flash may not match the white balance of the ambient scene. ![]() This is part of why many photographers take a photo of a grey or white card as a reference to later use to adjust the raw image for white balance later. To have technically correct white balance, the color white is represented as perfectly white in your image. White BalanceĪccurate white balance depends on the color temperature of the scene. However, taking the reigns of your white balance settings is an important tool to improve your flash photography. Many beginning photographers may set their camera to AWB (auto white balance) and never think about white balance again. ![]() But together, they create the dynamic tension that makes the photo.Gels are cheap but powerful tools to help you work accurately and creatively with color temperature. The flash is overexposed by at least as much. The ambient is underexposed by ~1.5 stops. ![]() Here's a thought: This is not a "properly exposed" photo. Which in turn allowed me to underexpose the sodium vapors to use the ambient light's color to my advantage. It is lighting the floor, which shows up reflected in the bottom of the motor housing.Īnd most important, it is providing another light color and level on which to base my exposure. It is providing a nice spray of leading-line shadows coming from the fan blades, the braces and the guy. It is separating the person walking toward the fan. It is providing a hotspot to lead the eye into the photo. I like this solution because the one small back light is accomplishing a lot of things. The beam angle adjustment of the strobe was set to 24mm to get a nice wide throw of light in the cramped area. But it looks good, which is what really matters. Note that the strobe light is not technically what you would call "properly exposed," but rather 1.5 to 2 stops overexposed. So, now shooting at 1/30th at 2.8 (wide open and getting a saturated ambient color) I adjusted the output of the strobe by trial and error and arrived at 1/4 power as the best look on the backlight. What looks terrible at the proper exposure might look cool and dramatic when over or under exposed. Always consider altering the ambient portion of the exposure when faced with a light color you cannot easily balance for in camera. So while the sodium vapors looked pretty bad at the correct exposure, they gave a neat, warm color cast when underexposed by about a stop and a half. The ready light will act as a guide to help you keep something between you and a backlighting flash in a darkened room.) In a dark situation, mount the flash backwards on the stand then turn the head back around towards the camera. The flash is pointed directly at the camera, but hidden by the blade. Remembering that the shadows always point to the light source, the flash is obviously behind the bottom blade. To separate the blades and draw the viewer into the frame, I stuck a Nikon SB-800 on a small light stand and set it to 1/4 power. Next, let's create some tension and direction to it, using a single speedlight. So, now we have some cool tech-y ambient light. But dropped down a stop and a half, it actually took on an intense orange color. At normal exposure, it looked a lot like something you'd find in a diaper. The available light was depressingly crappy - about 1/10th of a sec at f/2.8 (ASA 400) with typical institutional sodium vapor as the color temperature. While shooting a story on the wind tunnel at the University of Maryland's Clark School of Engineering, I wanted to grab a photo of the giant fan that creates the 100mph+ winds for studying airflow around objects. ![]()
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