Every parent knows that the toy box (or basket in our case) is often times more fun than the toys inside. Throw an imaginative kid in and the thing becomes a rollercoaster, a racecar, or a fort. Knowing this, I threw our daughter into her toy basket and proceeded to watch her play, camera in hand. Just for fun, I started piling on her plush toys to see if I could get her buried like ET. Once the stack was in place, I switched on the camera and starting taking quick shots – all of which looked pale and uninteresting (bottom photo). I looked at the camera and noticed that it was on “auto” mode, so I switched it over to “manual,” changed the white balance and suddenly everything warmed up (top photo). I think I’ll call this photo, “You stick your kid in that box…”

Anyhow – this post isn’t about putting your kid in storage containers. It’s actually about getting the color you really want from your camera by working with your camera’s white balance. What’s white balance? Well, for a fairly in-depth overview, check out the Wikipedia entry. Done with that? Make any sense? Here’s what I took from the article: (Click continue reading for more!)

The type of light you use in a room (or have available outside) significantly affects the perceived colors of the things being lit. For example – fluorescent lights tend to make things in a room look greenish like in the Matrix. Incandescent lights (the bulb you bought from the store) make things look more yellow. Light coming through a window on an overcast day can make a warm room look blue and cold. Pretty obvious, right? The problem is that cameras (both film and digital) exaggerate this effect and can distort the colors you expect to see. The way cameras fix this problem is through “white balance.”

White balance filters the colors coming into the camera to make up for this exaggeration. If the color is too green, red can be added to neutralize the color. Add blue to yellowish images for the same effect. The trick is to know which filter to use, and most cameras try to do this for you through auto white balance. The camera’s computer looks at the light coming into the camera and tries to add the correct color to the photo to make sure the colors are appropriately evened out. The problem with this system is that sometimes the camera doesn’t get it right.

In our house, we have painted walls – all of which are fairly warm colors. Our camera’s auto white balance tends to look at the color of our walls and incorrectly assumes that we’re in a white room being lit by incandescent lights, adding blue to the image to correct the color. The problem is that the real light source is the sun coming through the windows, and so the photo looks overly bluish. Not good.

The best solution for us, and really for anyone wanting to get the right color in their photos, is to switch the camera to “manual” and set the camera to the correct white balance filter. Not sure how to do that on your camera? Read the manual! Wait – you do still have that manual, right?