Experiment with the Wrong White Balance

One of the technical features that I like most about digital cameras is the ability they give you to match the sensor's color response to the color of the existing light using the white balance control. In the old (i.e. film) days, if you wanted to match a film to the light source you either had to choose a film that was balanced for that type of lighting (daylight film for daylight, tungsten film for tungsten, etc.) or use filters to "correct" the film for the existing light. With digital cameras, of course, you just open up a menu and tell it what the predominant light source is and shoot--and you can even fine-tune the response via a color-picker/color-temperature chart on with most DSLR cameras.

But you don't always have to choose the correct white balance. In fact, sometimes you get a more pleasing or more creative photo if you intentionally use the wrong white balance. If you use the tungsten setting in a daylight scene (as I did for the shot above), for example, you end up with a photo this unnaturally blue. Why? Because in order to balance the sensor's response to tungsten light, which is naturally very red because it has a warmer color temperature than, say, daylight, it adds additional blue to the scene. But if you use that extra blue in daylight scenes, you end up with photos that have a very cool twilight appearance. That is exactly what I did to get the shot of the Christmas tree on my front lawn. I did shoot the photo at twilight and there is some artificial lighting (LED) but the predominant light is just daylight. I exaggerated its blue color by choosing a tungsten white balance--which, in effect, put a blue filter over the image.

You can do the opposite, too (and I often do). If you are shooting on a very cloudy day where the daylight has a lot of blue in it, you can use a "cloudy day" white balance setting to add warmth to a scene--that's what that setting is for. But you can also use the cloudy day setting (again, it's designed to add warmth) on a bright sunny day and that in turn will add extra warmth to portraits, landscapes, etc. In fact, I almost always use the cloudy-day setting--it is almost my default white balance setting for outdoor scenes because I like them warm.

Of course, the simplest way to tweak the white balance in all of your shots is to shoot in RAW and then adjust the white balance after the fact. The Adobe RAW converter, for example, has a white balance slider that essentially lets you make your white balance choices after the shot was made.

Get Positive Impact with Negative Space

I'm a firm believer that every tiny bit of the frame should be working toward the benefit of the whole. If there is something in a frame that isn't working--try to get rid of it, either by cropping with your zoom lens or by changing your vantage point. But there are times when using empty areas, what artists call negative space can be a useful and provocative part of your compositions.

There are actually three elements in any design: the positive space (that area where your subjects lives), the negative space (any substantial blank area in the frame) and the border. Your job is to create a pleasing interaction of these three elements.

Negative space can be used in a number of ways to help build a powerful composition. One way that negative space works is to simply create emphasis for the positive space (again, your subject). By photographing a horse on a hill with lots of sky behind it, for example, the eye naturally lands on the horse because it's the most interesting thing in the frame. Very importantly, blank areas in the frame can also be used to create a sense of balance. If you're photographing a tall ship in silhouette at sunset, for instance, you can balance the dark mass of the ship with a large bright area of sunset sky.

Yet another way that negative space can be exploited is to create a sense of distance and space. In the shot of the fishing boat, by using the negative space of the blank water so strongly at the bottom of the frame, it exaggerates the space between where I was standing and the boats. The eye can't help but travel up through the path of blank canvas and arrive at the boats. And by giving the eye such a long area to travel across, the brain has a better handle on the distances involved. You get a much better sense that I'm standing on the shore observing the boats.

Whenever you find an interesting object or subject to photograph, see if you can't find an area of relatively blank space--water, a lawn, sky, a big shadow--to help create a more interesting composition. Nothing can be a very powerful creative tool.

Manipulate White Balance for Better Color

White balance is a very useful and creative control, but unfortunately it's also very underused and often misunderstood. Essentially what the control does is to match the sensor's color response to the existing light. Most cameras have numerous white balance options that include choices like sunlight, shade, overcast days, fluorescent lighting and flash. By selecting the option that matches the type of lighting you're using, theoretically you'll get the best color match.

But using white balance is one of those confusing situations when choosing the "correct" option might not be the best choice. For example, if you're outside photographing a scene like this barn and it's a bright, sunny day, you'd think the best option would be to choose "sunny day" or "clear daylight." And that is exactly the setting that I used for the top photo here. The problem is that the photograph is too neutral. It's bland. By selecting the "shade" option (or you can use "cloudy day") instead, the camera adds extra warming filters to the scene (because it thinks it needs you want to compensate for the extra blue coloring typical of a cloudy day) and your image will turn out much warmer and more inviting (as the bottom shot demonstrates). Manipulating white balance in this way will help you get exactly the color balance that you want--whether it's correct or not.

In fact, I use the "cloudy day" (which adds a lot of warming to scenes) almost all the time for daylight scenes simply because I like the warmer look. If you want to find out what each different setting does, it's easy: mount your camera on a tripod and shoot several exposures of a scene using each of the different white balance options. That's what I did for this test, though the entire test consisted of about eight different frames and settings.