A Question of Balance

Getting white balance perfect is always one of the many elements a photographer struggles with. For any non-photogs or beginners out there, white balance is the process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. Our eyes do it automatically, instantly making adjustments so our brains perceive not just whites, but all colors correctly, no matter what temperature the light is. The light has to have some major color added to it before our brain tells us a white sheet of paper, which we know is suppose to be white, is no longer white.

Different light temperatures are the culprit of weird colored photos, usually bouncing back and forth from the blue/green, cool side (under 5000 k) side of the scale to the yellow/orange side (over 5000k) with 5000k being the normal, daylight color at 12 noon that the Kelvin scale is based off of. A camera sensor has to have the temperature of the light programmed into it so that it renders the photo image colors correctly. Most new digital cameras do have an automatic setting that will get you close to the right temperature, but I haven't used one yet that completely nails it with out some fine tuning. You can also usually choose a specific setting with your digital camera (such as daylight or florescent) if you know you'll be in that same light for awhile, or you can even manually put in the exact white balance using various methods depending on your make and model of camera.

The trick for us, especially with weddings, is the light you are in is constantly changing and you really don't have the time to be adjusting white balance "in camera" every 5 minutes. Any amount of time spent fooling around with camera settings is probably photo opportunities missed. So we choose to do most of our photo "white balancing" later in our post processing at home.

The two things that makes this method very simple for us is : We use Lightroom for editing, and we carry a Gray Card.

There are myriads of gray card manufacturers out there, all really the same, but the one we use is the WhiBal 3 1/2" x 6" model. Ours is an older model, so it looks a little different than the new one from B & H, but what we love is it fits in a back pocket but still has some size to it so it's easy to find quickly when you want it. Just pull it out at different spots in the venue, hold it in front of you and take a photo of it, then forget about white balance unless the light changes or you move to a different area. Then just grab it, take another pic of it and continue on. Later at home in Lightroom, all you have to do is grab the Gray Dropper tool, click it on the gray card, and like magic it transforms into the correct white balance. Then just apply that same WB to the rest of the photos taken in that area. Simple as that. Just a couple of clicks and all of the images taken in that area have perfect white balance.

Actually, the biggest problem is remembering to take a photo of the gray card. You just get into the "capturing the moment" zone and sometimes the artistic/documentary side of us over runs the technician side.

The above wedding would have been a royal pain with trying to set white balance without the gray card. There was natural evening light coming in the window at around 6000k, incandescent lights everywhere at around 2700k, and then occasionally using flashes which are around 5500k...we would have been changing camera settings after every few shots! But using the method above, at home we spent maybe 15 minutes total adjusting WB on all 1500 final images in Lightroom. Definitely the way to go when you find yourself in a constantly changing environment.

Jeffrey