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EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: What is white balance and what's the correct way to use it?
« on: January 17, 2013, 09:50:53 PM »Dear Original Poster,LOL! You made my morning. Now I can drag myself to the office and face the day
If this is your first experience with White Balance ... stop looking at this post and immediately run into the other room where your significant other is sitting and give them a big hug. Then swiftly seize your camera and using whatever settings are full auto (green box) take a bunch of pictures. Burst, Timed, Horizontal, Vertical, anything. Then download them onto your computer and look at them together and talk about the great expressions, and the fun you had taking the pictures, and then go get an ice cream. When your done, come back home and snuggle and then right before bed, when you are sitting up reading a book... reach over, grab your camera, and snap another few pictures under the soft white light of the lamp on the nightstand. Maybe even splurge with a couple of hilarious self portraits together. Then go to bed and dream about how you'll look at these great pictures tomorrow.
This is immensely important. If you don't do this, you'll be missing out on your last chance to take a picture and ... deep breath everyone ... not be critical of it. The fact is, white balance is an enormous rat hole. Once you start down this path you won't ever go back to that happy place where a sorta exposed, lamp lit, color suppresed, low contrast image will do. Oh no my friend, from now on its not about taking pictures ... its about taking pictures with grey cards and modifiers and obsessing about Kelvins. In fact, you wont even be able to walk into someones house without thinking 'You really should have used color balanced 5500k bulbs in those lamps with white shades'. And for awhile folks will think ... maybe he's got something there. But then after hanging out with you and your custom white balanced buddy's for a night, the rest of your friends will start to think ... 'Man, if I'm not wearing a shirt with a red ring on it or holding a grey card this guy doesn't even notice me'. And they couldn't be farther from the truth because you and I both know you for sure noticed them. In fact, you noticed they were lit with a 2700k soft white bulb from home depot and its not doing much for their skin tones.Cheers!
Brilliant! Do you have a blog?
