Weekly Workshop 5 – Flash and White Balance

This week I met Elyse and her beautiful daughter Rose.  We were going to meet outside but a cold spring rain kept us inside.  Fortunately, they have a wonderful home in the inner Richmond of San Francisco so it wasn’t a problem at all.  I continued my work with on camera flash and added in a white balance challenge.  A few days back I saw Ed Pignol speak at a PPGBA meeting (Professional Photographers of the Greater Bay Area).  He said that a key aspect of his photography (which is amazing with a capital A), is fine tuning the white balance.  He was the first photographer I heard say that he uses the manual WB setting predominantly rather then the camera presets (Automatic, Sunny, florescent, cloudy, etc).  I had never done that so I thought I would give it a try.  I am always looking for ways to improving results while reducing my post processing time.

Hard to say if it was the great light, beautiful little girl. wonderful house or the white balance fine tuning that produced the results but overall I was really happy with this approach.  Does require for greater awareness of surroundings and settings but that is probably a good thing.  You can see the light got green in the shots from her room (with the horse) where the walls were green, a bit warmer with the hard wood floors, a little cooler/bluer when she was looking out the frontdoor glass.   Next step will be learning the manual settings for different colors.  One big bonus was that post processing was much easier. One color preset to pop the colors a bit and then just a little exposure correction. As a San Francisco Photographer, I think this will be really helpful for shooting in different houses and apartments. Light can be so crazy in San Francisco with the ever changing weather.  Getting great exposure no matter where the house is and no matter where the family is in that house, will be very helpful.

Thanks Elyse and Rose. Hope you enjoy the photos.

And if you want to hear Ed speak this week, come to the San Francisco Smugmug User group meeting.

Blog link:  http://jchandlerphotography.com/1703

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