Did you know just how much our cameras struggle to do a simple task like make a white bit of paper look white?
Video camera’s read light in one way only. They dont adapt like our eyes do, cameras need to be programmed to know what it right and what is wrong. If you look through the viewfinder of a camera indoors a white object in the shot will appear an orangey colour due to the surrounding tungsten lights we use in our houses. White objects under the sunlight outdoors will show up a bluey colour. So we need to program our camera so that it can understand the the correct colours in the shot based on the surrounding light sources. The best colour to use for this is white. Hence - White Balance.
A white peice of paper indoors will appear yellowy orange until you’ve told the camera that white shouldn’t look yellow, it should look white! You do this by going to your manual white balance settings and you’ll find a manual one push button setting which you need to press and you’ll instantly see the change.
White balance is measured in K after Kelvin so on some video cameras you might have a 3200k display setting for example. You dont really need to worry about the number of Kelvin you have unless perhaps you’re filming a multi camera shoot, in which case you might need to discuss with the other camera operator the Kelvin reading they got.
Alternatively you have a series of white balance presets that work brilliantly, but are never going to be exactly correct unless you manually white balance for your surroundings. If you move from one room in a house to another you might need to re-white balance. For example a bedroom into a kitchen. The lighting will most likely be different. If you move from indoors to outdoors or vice versa you will certainly need to white balance. Unless you’re lazy and you use the presets.
The blue coloured photo on the left is an example of not having set the white balance to read white in outdoor light. Before I took this shot the camera was still set to white under tungsten light (indoors), so whilst outside, I pointed the camera at something white (A white van that drove past) pressed the one push preset button and blamo. The results are in the photo on the right.
