Wedding Photography Tips for Beginners - Properly White Balancing Your Photos Part 1

A wedding by its nature can last many hours and have many different locations. For these reasons will find yourself taking pictures where there are many different light sources that will affect the white balance of your photos. For example, you may be shooting in a church that has a lot of candles and tungsten lights, but later in the night you may find your flashes competing with the lights on the dance floor. In part one of this article, I am going to give you some tips on how to be aware of your light sources, and tips on shooting images with correct white balance in basic situations. In part two, I am going to continue these tips in more complex lighting situations.

The first and most important tip I can give is to shoot in RAW. RAW is much more forgiving than JPG. In JPG, your image is stuck with the white balance setting you had on the camera when you shot the photo. With RAW, even if you had your white balance set wrong on your camera while shooting, you will later be able to adjust the white balance while editing your photos. Moreover, most of the programs to edit RAW have a white balance tool. This means while editing your photo in one of these programs, you just need to click on the white balance tool, and then click on a part of the photo that should look white. You are shooting a wedding right? Then in almost every picture you will either have a bride in a white dress to click on, or else the white shirts of the men in the wedding. If that doesn’t work, sometimes you can click on the table napkins in the background, or another trick of mine is to click on the whites of a person’s eyes in a photo. But this white balance tool only works if there are not competing sources of light. So on to the next tip.

The second tip I can offer you is to pay attention to your light sources. It is easy to recognize when your light source is sunlight, but also recognize when your light source is tungsten or fluorescent. Furthermore, you need to make sure there are not competing light sources when possible. This means if you are using a fill flash, it may need a colored gel to match your main light source. Don’t worry; this is a lot easier than it sounds. The color temperature of a flash without any gels is made to match natural daylight. So if you are using the flash as fill outside during normal daylight hours (that is, not sunrise or sunset) you don’t need any colored gels. The same goes if you are shooting indoors and your main light is the daylight coming in through the windows. I find myself in this situation a lot when I am shooting the bride getting ready. It is usually still early in the day and most of the light is natural daylight. If there are some small lamps on in the room, I may turn them off so that the only light sources are the daylight coming in the window, and my fill flash.

I hope these tips help you begin to recognize the many different possible light sources you may find during a wedding. In part two of this article, I will explain how achieve correct light balance in more complex situations.

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