White Balance

White balance is really critical, and I wish I had known this a long time ago. When I bought my camera to go to Kenya, I knew even less about photography than I know today—hard to believe, but true. It turns out that the weather was mainly overcast, and this led to pretty drab photos that I wanted to touch up later. As it happens, automatic color adjustments in most software programs are not really all that great: they overcompensate based on slavish adherence to the color or value curves in the image histogram (this doesn't really need to mean anything to you at the moment, but it does give me an idea for another posting sometime). This is okay when colors are normally distributed in the image, but usually they aren't—that's why we want to fix them in the first place.

The drabness of an image is often the result of improper white balancing. A warmer white balance leads to more saturated photos with deeper reds. In shady conditions, this is usually needed to counteract the bluer tones in the scene. Ken Rockwell (linked right) has a good article on white balance that's worth a quick read, and others exist on the web, too.

This is a bit of an article on my experience.

Black and White

There are a lot of variables in photography—maybe that's one of the reasons I enjoy it. The complexity of picture taking helps ensure that photographing the same subject several times never really returns the same result.

I'm mainly a colors person; I enjoy color and in proper combinations I find it compelling and striking. That said, I'm also a fan of geometry (the only math I ever did very well in, and incidentally the best graphics course I took in my CS degree). I realized recently that there are two primary reasons that intro photo courses don't use color.

Before and After

Composition remains one of my worst skills. I usually shoot very instinctively, and unfortunately my instincts are not all that great.

Often I'll shoot out the car—it's no-look shooting, don't worry; I tape the lens at infinity and don't consult the viewfinder—using the 24mm. It's fast enough, and the wider field of view gives a few more options for cropping. Moreover, the exposure is completely manual, which adds a bit of randomness—it's not adjusting to changing lighting conditions. The exposure is sometimes pretty interesting.

I am usually too lazy to edit photos, but I made an exception in this case.

My Gear

Probably the easiest thing to write about, since it's more technical than technique, if you take my meaning, is equipment.

Photography

In 2007, I bought my first SLR—a Nikon D40. I had basically decided to take a trip to Africa that summer, and it seemed like a good plan to get a camera for the experience.

This, in short, is how I came to be interested in photography. By trade, I'm a computer programmer, and I am a fairly experienced martial artist (I'll be a 4th Dan in Tang Soo Do in a month's time following this writing). Art has never much been my forte, although I am an occasional writer and generally accounted as fairly articulate.