My girlfriend and I were talking photography the other week. She was telling me how much more she likes her pictures now that she has learned how to use the white balance options on her camera. I believe her quote was "flash is evil". LOL. Thanks, Lisa! Well, anyway, she was telling me that when she is snapping pictures of her kids around the house, she sets her camera to "tungsten" since those are the bulbs in her house and then just snaps with no flash. Since we had that conversation, I’ve been playing with this option on my camera and I am digging the results. The other day, I was snapping pictures in a bedroom of my daughter. Although I had the blinds open to let in the sunlight, I thought I should use the tungsten option since I thought she was being lit by the overhead room light. I snapped a few and on my LCD screen I thought she looked funny so I tried with the daylight option. The first picture is with the tungsten option on and the second is with the daylight option on. She looks blue in the first one don’t you think? Yet the second looks more natural.
And just for practice, I took her to the unfinished basement at night under the fluorescent lights just to see if it would be as effective there. Here is a picture from that experiment.
I’d say this is a good thing for every mommy photographer to practice and know! It’ll make for better pictures in the family scrapbook album.
FYI – in all three of these pictures I have my ISO set to 1600. My kids can move pretty quickly sometimes so I thought that was my best bet. I should probably experiment at lower ISO just to see what happens too. I’ll let you know how that goes.
