I'll Never Forget again.... White Balance and Image Play Black

The best lessons learned are the hard ones. You know those hard lessons that make your heart sink or maybe make you want to hit something, or maybe just make you want to say a few choice words?...yeah those lessons.  The hardest so far for me was the lesson I learned about the importance white balance and playback.  Here's the story ~

Let me put the lesson into perspective for you.  It was the end of June, forecast was 97 degrees and I had signed up for a Walking Tour of the Canal Walk in Richmond Virginia.  I'm not sure how long the walk was in miles, but at 97 degrees and high humidity, I'd argue with anything less than 3 miles!  People were dropping off like flies at different stages of the walk, my feet were hurting, I had ran out of water and I was HOT, but I hung in there til the very end. 

There were two goals for the day - practice using the aperture priority mode and learn about the history of the James River Canal. I knew with all the tall buildings downtown, it would be a great opportunity to play around with depth of field.   What I had not counted on was what I saw when I got home.......





This is where my hear sank....

This would be where a few choice words came in....

The good thing is, I was back and forth between automatic and aperture priority modes that day, so I do have some salvagable photos.  The bad news is everything that I really, really liked that captured great depth of field...WAS BLUE!! The other good news is...remember black and white??...saved the day again! 

Lesson Learned:  Everytime I take my camera out, I need to remember to check the settings and I need to learn which settings aren't automatic in the professional modes and always check before shooting.  The second thing is check my shots often in preview.  If I had done that earlier, I would have seen the blue photos and been able to fix the issue from the start.  And third...white balance, white balance, white balance....get it right!!!  So...what happened? 

Prior to this outing, I had been practicing with different white balance settings indoors.  The photos taken on this day while in automatic mode came out great.  I have very little control in this mode, the camera chooses the settings it feels are appropriate and that's that.   However, in apeture mode, that's a different story.  The camera allows me to change many more settings, and our friend white balance, just happens to be one of them.  The blue you see in these photos, happen to be the result of taking pictures outdoors in bright sunlight, using an indoor white balance setting called Tungsten B.K.A....household light bulbs. 

Needless to say, I haven't made that mistake again, and I preview just about every shot before moving on to the next one if time permits. It may take longer, but it is so worth it in the end. 

Unveiling,

Dee

test weekend

This weekend, we'll be doing something different and we'll just call it a Blog party until I come up with something else. I'll do all the thinking, you just enjoy the writing and comments. I'm going to give you a blog theme to post on your blog for the weekend, you blog about it, then post your link in Mr. Linky below. You can blog with word, pictures videos or whatever you come up with. Come back during the weekend and visit the links below for other bloggers posts and leave comments on their post...that's it! Oh, and grab a Girls Night Out badge to the left and post it at the heading of your post, so all will know that you're participating in a Girls Night Out event.

What's the point? We'll get to learn about all other girlfriends, find some interesting blogs and hopefully have some fun. so, on with the party and I'll start to get us all going, leave your comments then visit everyone else.

Girls Night Out on a Deserted Island

"If you had to plan to be stranded on a deserted island for a month , what 10 things would pack or take along with you besides clothes and toiletries?"

1. without a doubt, there would be a man involved...for warmth of course :) (clean blog here, LOL) and that man would be Idris Elba..he's British and he's HOT!!

2. Of course I'd have to have some nice wine, water would be nice, but that would bring me down to 7 remaining things. With this fella coming along I think I could live off of fish and island plants..Gilligan did it! LOL

3. My camera. I imagine there would be plenty of beautiful things to take pictures of and I could incorporate into some jewelry designs.

4. Sleeping bag or blankets just in case we're fighting the elements

5. matches, can't imagine trying to remember my Girl Scout skills for making a fire.

6. a book...who am I kidding!

7. Some rope. It would have to be useful for something, not sure what, but the Robinson family had some!

8. A knife, again would have to be a useful tool for something

9. a Carpenter and his tools!

10. jewelry and tools...I rarely go anywhere without them!






When I'm not hosting Girls Night Out, you can find me creating jewelry at www.runakojewelry.com