(Part two, continued from Shooting in Variable Light: Tricks of the Trade)
White balance is the black sheep of the family when it comes to ensuring your digital shoot looks its best in variable light. It’s so easy to focus on subject matter, exposure, and composition and then, almost as an afterthought, realize that “Oh yeah, white balance – well, I guess I’ll just leave it on the ‘auto’ setting.”
Shooting in a studio has its advantages, and one of the biggest ones is that you have control of lighting—you set the intensity, the color, the shadows, and you stay in command throughout the shoot. Basically, you can make the light adapt to whatever scene you wish to illuminate, in whatever manner you’d like. When you’re outside of a controlled environment, however, you are at the mercy of the “ambient” lighting conditions and you must adapt to them.
Winter shooting means preparing to deal with off-kilter white balances, especially when you take photos in the snow and use an auto-white balance setting. Snow, in particular, causes an auto setting to produce a gray tone in the photo, such as seen in this simple but very snowy snapshot:
I was recently asked to create a slide show for a photographer friend who shoots a lot of weddings. His images for this particular event, taken about a year ago, were the standard mix of wedding photos—ceremony, formals, reception—but were taken with several different digital cameras (he often uses an assistant to shoot, also). One of the cameras was a newer model, and another was probably three or four years old. I was, in a word, stunned at the difference in lower-light image quality produced by the two cameras, both of which were set to the same exposure. Notably, the older camera exhibited a tremendous amount of noise.
Cameras are designed to detect light, and much of the effort in digital image sensing technology development over the last five years has focused on improving low-light sensitivity with minimal amounts of digital noise. For example, the Canon 1D Mark III, with an ISO capability ranging to ISO6400, shows far less digital noise on images taken in low light at, say ISO 1000 than an earlier model of the 1D series or, for example, a Canon 10D. Nikon has made similar developments in its image sensors, over about the same time period (but I’m more hard-pressed to give you specifics, since I exclusively shoot Canon).
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