Photo Friday//White Balance

Welp, seems I'm already failing at staying on track with this Photo Friday thing! My excuse is that I've been sick...Good enough? This week I'm going to be sharing what I've learned about White Balance! But first, I'm going to share a couple photos I took over the last couple of weeks, using what I learned about the Manual Setting. As you will see from the photos, I didn't do anything all that exciting...on our way out on Friday night my car broke down. So that was the extent of our weekend excitement! (I tried to get a photo of this, but frozen hands + the inside of a tow truck does not equal a nice photo).

If you're just here to learn about White Balance you can just scroll to the bottom to see the lesson!

 leaves on a crisp sunny day//a hot mug of cocoa//working from bed//snuggles from my puppy at home//brainstorming by the fire//cleaning out my closet 

Photo Friday, Part 2: White Balance

What is White Balance? Basically, light has a color temperature - it can be warm (red) or cool (blue)...White balance allows us to balance the temperature of the light in our pictures. Our eyes do this for us, and DSLRs have an auto mode that tries its best to do it, but it doesn't always work perfectly. The Auto White Balance mode works best when there is a good contrast of dark and light.

Now that we know what White Balance is...did you know that there are different presets on your camera for White Balance? Mine has Incandescent, Cool-White Fluorescent, Direct Sunlight, Flash, Cloudy, Shade, and then a Preset Manual setting. Using these depending on the setting can help get rid of the nasty yellow glow of indoor lights, or the depressing grey light cast by clouds. Here are some links to helpful posts that talk about (and show) each setting and what it does: It's Overflowing, My 3 Boybarians, Laid Off Mom.

You can also set your own White Balance if none of these presets will do the trick. These two posts talk a bit about how to do this: Photoxels, My 3 Boybarians. I doubt I will be doing much of this for my everyday photography, but I might give it a try in the coming weeks...seems like a good skill to have under my belt, just in case.

Also, I just wanted to share this tutorial about photographing your christmas tree - I used it as a guide when I was taking the photos for this post...everything I learned in my last Photo Friday also really helped.

Remember to share any of your photos or photography tips in the comments! I would love to hear from you :)