My dear friend D. had asked me to write a few basic photography tutorials about things that might be useful for a beginner to know. This is the first installment in the series “I wish I knew this 5 years ago” when I first got a decent digital camera and started to demand perfect pictures every time.
I often get asked while shooting an event about what camera I have. I respond that I have Nikon d50 trying to emphasize that the exact model of your gear is not as important as how much you know about it. And I say that from a personal experience – for years I have been shooting in “Auto” mode on my point-and-shoot camera. I was getting a few good pictures, but mostly something was often off in them. I have been secretly jealous of my friends that had SLR cameras… And thought that only the amount of money I am willing to spend on a piece of equipment separates me from those great pictures I have envisioned in my head. I would borrow my friends’ SLR cameras and play with them and then take the same pictures with my point-and-shoot, but the second images were always worse – even in the almighty AUTO mode. Only the steep price and the bulkiness of most SLR kept me from purchasing one.
That wasn’t until I took my first “real” photography class at Piedmont Adult School, where the teacher had ordered all the students to READ their camera’s manual, things started to become more clear. Who would have thought that the little white pocket book that is included with your camera has something useful in it? 
Most people don’t even hold on to them – I was lucky enough to have a spouse that made me keep such a “useless” book.
As a good student I eagerly went home to do my “homework.” I was sincerely surprised that the manual wasn’t that hard to comprehend and that it had images to help you. That was a defining moment in my photographic “career”, I was determined to study the manual from cover to cover and see what I could squeeze out of my unappreciated point-and-shoot camera.
The first most important thing that has improved my pictures was learning about White Balance. This feature is adjustable in most respectable point-and-shoot cameras and in all SLRs.
But what is White Balance and why do we need to tweak it to get better pictures? So here is the deal – different light sources (such as the sun, regular light bulbs, fluorescent bulbs, etc.) shine lights of different color. That is why when you go from the outside on a very sunny day to a brightly lit room everything seems a bit yellow at first. Our eyes are great at adjusting the way we see color, so that the white object still look white to us under different colored light. Let’s look at the same object taken with different White Balance settings:
You can see that all of the settings produce different results. I would say that the Flash and Auto settings were the closest to the truth.
It is awesome if your camera is smart enough to correctly calculate the White Balance for every picture, but sometimes even the most expensive SLRs have a problem with that. That’s exactly why when comparing my point-and-shoot images they often looked wrong. One way to fix that is, of course, to buy a smarter camera, but a cheaper approach is to set your White Balance to an appropriate setting before you shoot.
So here it is, friend D., the tutorial you have been waiting for. Now, go find a manual for your camera and see how to set White Balance on it. I would love to see any pictures you might take of your adventures.
I hope you take it for what it is – my friendly advice to everyone who wanted to know how improve their pictures but was shy enough to ask. I wish someone had gave me this advice 5 years ago.
Tags: cameras, photography, tutorial, white balance
Posted in Main and Other 10 months, 2 weeks ago at 7:19 AM. 2 comments
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I am excited to read and learn from these posts!
Mashka, i dropped my camera… so the flash doesn’t work anymore… so your advice on reading the manual is not gonna work… BUT i promise i will read the manual of my brand new D40
)) happy kak slon
thanks for the tutorial!!! keep writing them!