Wedding Photography Tips for Beginners - Properly White Balancing Your Photos Part 2



I've written these two articles to give you some standard and intermediate tips to properly color balance your photos throughout a wedding. As I stated in the other write-up, a wedding has a great number of light sources and these light sources compete to be the principal light in your pictures. The difficulty is, if these light sources have highly distinct color temperatures, your pictures will have an incorrect white balance. Envision taking a picture exactly where the room is lit by fluorescent overhead lighting, but in the corner of the space there is a set of candles in front of a white wall. These two really distinctive light sources will give you an incorrect white balance. To preserve this from happening, you will have to have to be conscious of light sources for the duration of a wedding. I discussed this in the first article, as properly as how to use your flash without having a colored gel in daylight, or exactly where the principal light source is daylight. In this post I will give you helpful hints on how to adequately gel your flash in unique lighting circumstances.

Indoors you will usually be faced with one particular of 3 most important light sources. These are: daylight, fluorescent, and tungsten. When you enter a room you will want to be in a position to identify the most important source of light, then match it. I talked about daylight in the previous post. If your light source is fluorescent, they you will want to put a fluorescent gel on your flash and set the white balance on your camera to fluorescent lighting. Nowadays there are numerous completely different sorts of fluorescent lighting with unique color temperatures. This implies you will want to carry a couple of unique fluorescent gels with you. Likewise, you will need a few unique CTO gels to match diverse forms of tungsten lighting. These tungsten gels are: full CTO, 1/two CTO, and 1/4 CTO. As prior to, put a CTO gel on your flash and set the white balance on your camera to tungsten. With either a fluorescent gel or CTO gel, attempt distinct ones out and see what matches finest the key light in the space.

If you enter a space and see competing light sources you will have to have to remedy the situation. In the opening instance with the room lit by candles and fluorescent lighting you have two possibilities: blow out the candles or turn off the overhead lighting. If the candles are not going to be in frame, or they are far enough from exactly where you are shooting such that they are not giving off competing light then you can shoot no issue. Following this principle, if I enter a room and there is tungsten light, I am not going to shoot with my bare flash (which is made to match daylight). I need to have to determine that the principal source is tungsten, and put on a gel to match it.

Lastly, sunrise and sunset is not standard daylight! This means when shooting the wedding couple with the sunset in the background for instance, you will will need to use a CTO gel on your flash. Which one particular? As stated above, try completely different ones, and see which 1 finest suits the light the sun is giving off at this specific time and location. Hope these tips aid. Great Luck!