Viewer Q & A - FL-50 Tutorial / Camera in Manual - Photography with Imre
Alright, so I managed to finish up this nifty video tutorial about using the FL-50/R flash with the camera (E-3 and E-620) set to manual. I'm terribly sick, so off I run to bed; will write more later!
hi Imre,
ReplyDeleteI have some confusions regarding the white balance.
Let's put the scene in this way,
there scene has the temperature at 5500K which is sunny day, if I adjust my camera setting to tungsten and the outcome would turn out very bluish (Which looks cool, the color temperature for cool is higher, why it is not in orangie but bluish?) I thought it supposed to be in orangie, since the color for tungsten is orangie.
How if I take the same scene but adjust the WB to cloudy mode? What the outcome of the picture would be?
Your valued advice will be appreciated.
Thank you in advance.
Have a good day..
Hi Mido!
ReplyDeleteGreat question. When you adjust the white balance, you are "telling" your camera what the color temperature of the SCENE is, not what you want the picture to look like. The camera does not care if you are right or wrong with the setting, it will simply use whatever white balance value you use and the camera will try to compensate for the color cast (whether the color cast is really there or not).
Using your example: If the actual (or real) scene color temperate is 5500K, but you set your camera to 3000K (approx. tungsten) then your camera will think that the scene is "warm" and that it has an orange or red cast to it. So what your camera does is when you take the photo, it tries to compensate for that warm color cast by cooling down the image (putting more blues in).
If I set the WB on the camera to 7000K (roughly a cloudy setting) then the camera will assume that the scene has a blue color cast to it, so the camera will try to warm up the photo by adding more reds and oranges.
Another way to put this is that the color temperature (or white balance setting) you use is NOT what you want the scene/photo to look like, but instead represents what the color temperature of the scene is so the camera can "remove" that color cast.
I actually wrote something similar when I did my episode on white balance, here's the link for that if you'd like to take a look:
http://binarygraphite.blogspot.com/2009/12/part-2-photography-with-imre-z-balint_26.html
I hope that makes sense. Thank you for the question. Take care.
Imre.
Hi Imre, thank you very much for your explanantions. I was so confusing about the term previously because I was kept thinking that at tungsten mode, the color range is red/orange, so by set it to that mode, the outcome of the picture it supposed to be in orange/red. So, I was totally in wrong way.
ReplyDeleteThanks again! ^^
Glad to help Mido! :) Just to be clear, the color of tungsten is still red/orange, but always remember that the white balance setting on the camera applies to what your eyes see.
ReplyDeleteSo if you are shooting in candle light for example (warmer colors, similar color range to tungsten), then you can set your camera to tungsten, which should create a more realistic photo (adding cooler colors so the photo won't be so yellowish).
Happy shooting!