One observation I discovered lately on photo contests is you get to sort through your best photos. You get to re-live and re-think your motivations for taking them, select the best of the best, send them off and hope someone else thinks as much of them as you do. That’s one of the essence of photo contests which is almost as much fun as winning them.
Even though there are tons of tips and guides you can find online, none of it can guarantee a 100% chance to win photography contests. If someone has to tell you that your entries should be correctly exposed, in focus, well packaged and neatly presented, your odds of winning even so much as an honorable mention are slim-to-none. That’s the reality of photography contests, its a competition – survival of the best.
Today my topic is colors in photography. We all know how perfect balance of lighting affects our entries on various picture contests. The white balance setting of a camera relates exclusively to the colours that are captured. White balance is critical to a digital camera as it establishes the starting point for all the colours it will record. The purpose of white balance is to ensure that whatever the source of light, the colours of a subject photographed under that light will be reproduced as faithfully as possible.
By default, most digital camera’s white balance systems rely on an Auto white balance, a series of algorithms that divide the image into many segments to evaluate the light source, and then compensate for it by shifting the colour spectrum of the image according to that light source. The light colour evaluation system works by comparing the data gathered against the known colour shifts imparted by different sources of light, such as sunlight, or fluorescent. Each camera manufacturer uses their own sets of algorithms to calculate the proper white balance for an image; and in most cases, the resulting colours are quite accurate. On occasion though, for a variety of reasons, the auto white balance can be in error, resulting in an image whose colours are not as accurate as they should be. This could be a tragedy for artists who are currently in a time constraint finishing his entries in a particular picture contest.
An incorrect white balance setting results in colour shifts, and these can be quite difficult to correct once the image has been finalized by the camera and saved in a format such as JPEG, or TIFF. This difficulty in correction, should the auto white balance be in error, is one of the advantages of the RAW image formats that are offered on some cameras. A RAW format allows correction to an improperly set white balance relatively easily, usually with the same software that is provided to convert the image into a more common format. On the other hand, correcting the white balance of images saved in other less flexible formats, JPEG for instance, which has deleted unnecessary colour information to reduce file size is sometimes hopeless.
White light is composed of all colours, but white light, be it natural or artificial, can vary in its purity. We all know for instance that the light of the setting sun is much more red than the light of the sun at noon , and this is reflected in the way we see colours . Similarly, we can also tell that the light produced by a cool white fluorescent tube is a bit more green than the light produced by a standard incandescent bulb.
On the next post I will demonstrate this, a series of images were taken using the Auto white balance of a camera, and switching the light sources for each shot. I will gather some neat photos and show you guys how the white balance of cameras affects each photo we take. I know this is a common issue for experts but for the benefit of those who are still learning this can be a great help. Keeping them prepared on every little details to make better chances of winning photo competition. See you on my next post guys and good luck to your photo competitions.
To see how John Warton, senior photo editor at Photo Laureates reviews photographs and meet, go to www.thephotochallenge.com
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