Bob Log III performing live at The Wall, Taipei, Taiwan. Getting accurate white balance in a live music environment is often quite tricky.
My very first entry in this phototip series looked at creative white balance. A few people have written to me requesting a basic description of white balance, so here goes.
White balance is essentially the color temperature (in degrees Kelvin) and tint of light. A neutral white balance is what appears normal to the human eye and anything that deviates from this appears tinted. That’s not to say it’s wrong, far from it, just that it’s different.
When using film, it was normal to buy films specifically for different light sources (daylight, tungsten) or through the use of lens filters to adjust the light in some way. Digital cameras though greatly simplify and expand the options available to photographers. White balance can be either selected automatically by the camera; through a variety of standard settings (daylight, shade, cloudy, fluorescent, tungsten, flash); or by manually presetting it.
If you’re shooting in JPEG format, it’s extremely important to get your white balance settings correct in-camera before you shoot. This is not so important when working in RAW as you can set the white balance in the processing stage. Setting a manual white balance is good practice if you’re going to be shooting for a long time in continuous, unchanging light, or if you are working in some kind of mixed light that you can’t change or control. Your camera manual will have instructions for manually setting the white balance as the process differs from camera model to camera model.
As a bonus, for anyone who’s not familiar with Bob Log III, he’s quite a performer. Here’s a selection of images from the two performances of him that I’ve shot.
Music | Bob Log III – Images by Craig Ferguson
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