Light and Camera Settings
Something of a bright idea lately, I’ve been playing with sunlight and light bulb light with different white balance settings on my camera.
One thing I observed was that my point and shoot camera’s “Shade” white balance setting gave better results than the “Sun” setting during early morning. Do the results remain the same when the sun is up high and bright? It appears not!
It makes sense that the “Sun” white balance setting should be used when directly sunlight (or a cloudy sky) is overhead. I’m not sure why the “Shade” setting worked better in the morning, but I should probably test it out more.
One of the big problems I face is that my so-called white sunlight-colored bulb leaves everything very orange with all of my camera’s white balance settings (except for one that leaves everything a pale blue), and adding the camera’s flash to anything makes it even more orange (with little to no blue/green to speak of)!
Maybe I’m doing something wrong…
I decided to get a white subject, and then try out the different white balance settings: Sunny, Shade, Tungsten, and Fluorescent. The result?
From now on, I will use the tunsten setting when using this bulb for light, and I will avoid using the flash for these indoor/night-time photographs I take! (The truth is, I knew this is what I should be using, but I mostly used flash, so I thought I must not be using the correct setting!)