Now that another glorious Fall has passed and the trees are bare we look forward to, hopefully, much snow this winter. Snow offers some challenges to photography, mainly because it's white.
Anyone who has ever tried to paint a room or two in their house knows that there are sooo many whites to choose from. Not only that, but the same white looks different at different times of the day or with different light. Incandescent light is warmer than, say, fluorescent light.
We can see the different tones of white when they are put next to each other but by themselves our brain sees a generic white. Different light sources radiate a different color light. You notice this when you look out over the different lights of the night. Some look yellow while others look blue or even
almost white.
The camera doesn't know what is white, so the white we see as white might be recorded by the camera with a color cast to it. With film we must use a film that is color balanced to the certain light temperature with which we are photographing. More on that some other time.
With digital capture the camera designers helped us out by giving us different white balance choices. These are little icons on our menu; a light bulb, for shooting inside your house under incandescent light; something that looks like a fluorescent light, for shooting in offices or areas under fluorescent light; clouds, for shooting under overcast skies; a lightening bolt, for using flash, etc. To avoid color casts in your pictures read your camera manual to understand what all your icons mean and start using them.
