White balance is an age old problem that is becoming all too modern with so many people moving to digital SLRs. Today’s cameras all have a pretty decent auto white balance settings, from the basic point/shot cameras to the pro SLRs. There are also several “fixed” settings on many of the simple cameras and most of the SLRs like Sunlight, Shade, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent, etc. But as many of you may know, these settings are not always perfect, and sometimes far from it.

White balance is one of the more confusing aspects of digital photography and is one of the things that really baffles people when they go from simpler point and shoots to more advanced DSLR cameras and can’t figure out why the color of their images is so bad. Today we take a look at white balance and how it affects the color of your photos.

We always take our own product shots, while manufacturer shots are usually very nice, they often can be retouched to make products look better than they really are. With the product shots for our articles, the only retouching may be to remove some stray dust.

Learning all of the technical aspects of digital photography can be quite mind numbing for newcomers. Trying to learn about aperture, f-stops, shutter speed, depth of field, and other technical terms can be a bit overwhelming. So what do you do when you know what you want to accomplish but you just don’t know how to go about it?

For the casual user, the ability to get your flash on-camera in a very inexpensive way can make a dramatic difference in your photographs and for this price, how can you afford not to pick up a set?

David Berman is a British news photographer and has posted a narrated slideshow showing some recent assignments with the final photos and then diagrams detailed the lighting setups he used. This is great information to learn how really dramatic photos can be taken. What is nice is that he doesn’t rely on a truckload of equipment, often its just one or two lights with umbrellas (brollys), reflectors, or gells.

Photographers are human and are therefor prone to making mistakes, however, some mistakes as a photographer can cost you dearly. Fortunately for me, my mistakes have never happened on a paid gig. I have however gone out to shoot nature and landscape shots and realized I didn’t have any compact flash cards once, and didn’t have my tripod another time.

Natural light can be your friend or your enemy depending on how you approach it. The biggest mistake people make is thinking that the sun is a giant soft light in the sky. While the Sun is over 92 million miles away, if you hold your thumb up to the sun at high noon, it appears to only be the size of your thumbnail making it a VERY small spotlight which causes very harsh shadows.

Muslin is an excellent background material because it can be stored easily, hung on almost anything, and takes light well. However, muslins are quite expensive, often heading into the $250+ range. As always, we try to save money where we can and finding muslins on eBay from Amvona for under $30 was just too good to pass up.

The most common mistake in doing a portrait is to use an on-camera flash. While an on-camera flash will illuminate a subject well, the direct head-on light will wash out all the shadows making the face look flat. So our first rule is to have the key light off to the side of the subject’s face.