Shoot photos like a pro
Colour temperature in more detail
Every light source emits light with a colour temperature, measured in kelvins or the symbol K. The biggest source is the sun but the colour of its light varies depending on where it is in the sky, the location and atmospheric conditions. At midday on a clear day, its output is around 5500-5700K although it will be higher and cooler at the beach or in the mountains.
The colour temperature also rises and gets more blue if it clouds over, while at sunset when the sun is low in the sky and ltered by haze the light gets warmer.
Our brain might not notice minor colour temperature variations but your camera will. So keep an eye on what’s happening with white balance and change settings, or create a custom white balance reading.
Banish banding
You can run into banding problems when shooting in some types of arti cial lighting. This candid was shot under uorescent strip lighting and in the rst shot (exposed at 1/320 sec) green banding is clearly visible across the image, most obviously on the woman’s white top. Banding and ickering can be reduced with the anti- icker feature if your camera has it. Here, it was resolved by setting a slower shutter speed of 1/90 sec.
Polarise it
The polariser is a lter with superpowers. It can reduce re ections from glass and water, intensify weak blue skies and beef up colours by cutting down glare, so if your shots lack saturation, try a polariser. However, its impact depends on many variables including lighting, the sky and the subject re ectance characteristics, so don’t leave it on the lens for every shot. We’ll be exploring the power of the polarising lter in issue 282.
Override the camera
Your camera’s Auto White Balance can be relied upon to give accurate results in most situations. However, there will be times when it will slip up. These shots show a problem experienced in Antelope Canyon, Arizona. The rst shot was taken with Auto White Balance and the red sandstone came out looking strange with a magenta tint. Changing the camera’s white balance to the daylight preset gave a much more accurate rendering of the Navajo sandstone.