White Balance

I received another lesson on white balance that really helped me out…I’m lucky to have such thorough examples (and to be able to share):

Colour temperature can be explained by considering why a candle always photographs with reds, oranges and yellows and considered warm, whereas snowboarding videos always seem pure white, blue, kind of cold.

Think of color temperature in the same way as with heat in the air, but with color. So there are “cool” sources of light, and “warm sources” of light. BUT NOTHING TO DO WITH HEAT. So you may ask, whaaaat? Simple, you can go buy a “light temperature reader” and instead of telling you this intensity of light, it will tell you the temperature of light. Temperature of light is measured in Kelvins. Examples:

Light bulb in house – 3200K (thirty two hundred kelvin) – OR STAGE LIGHTS
Sun in morning – 4000k (OR INCANDESCENT LIGHT – WHITE BULBS)
florescent light – 5600k (BLUE BULBS)
Sun in mid afternoon – 1200k (SUPER WHITE!)

The human eye automatically adjusts to these lights, so you usually just see a white piece of paper in front of you as white’ish.
But cameras don’t do this, so you have to tell them “USE THIS AS REFERENCE FOR WHITE ” (this table, or T-shirt, or landscape), then it will adjust accordingly.

If you are inside with 3200k light (light bulbs normal) and whitebalance, then you turn on a flourecent or one of those energy saver bulbs (they put out 5200k) they will look really white/blue

The weird thing though, like everything in photography, the bigger (ie. 12000k) t “cool” smaller (3200k) is “warm”

(Thank you Brit)

Photos – “On the set…”

Brit has been working “fairly steadily” for the past six months on his new film about abductions, metamorphisis, cam’s life and cinematography. I’ve been having a lot of fun taking pictures while he’s been filming around the house. His greatest assets so far have been his newly purchased smoke machine and leaf blower (for snow storm affects) and a collection of broken glass. Everything produced so far has looked experimentally professional! and has offered the perfect opportunities for photography lessons.

Check out Brit’s youtube for selected scenes: http://ca.youtube.com/user/britcruise

an ode to summer

I woke up this morning freezing in my apartment! It’s the first day I’ve closed my windows since April and what a miserable awakening it was. In memorandum of this summer, here are my favourite summer pictures, I will save my garden pictures for further posts. My ‘gear’ is the Nikon D40 and SB600 attachable flash.

Stay tuned for Fall pictures, sigh…