Project 52: Tungsten Balance

Once again, I have great sympathy for those students who learned photography with film cameras, and indeed took this course in the era of film. The time lapse from shooting to seeing the prints, combined with the heavy expense & faffing around with different types of film & filters, must have made it so difficult to learn and I am often struck by this when doing these projects.

Anyway, back to the project in hand. Starting with the candlelight images, the key learning points were:

• These were taken on "auto" white balance. Setting the white balance to "tungsten" neutralised some of the orange glow but not all of it. This confirms the point in the notes that candlelight is "redder" than tungsten.
• The light is very weak. This required the subject to stand almost right over the candle for his face to be illuminated.
  
• The most evocative pictures were those where the subject was right over the candle, and the shot exposed for his face. This caused the entire background to black out. Images which included the background just looked orange, and were unattractive.
  
• Candlelight produces lovely "interesting" portraits, however it is difficult to focus on the subject because of the weak light, and care must be taken not to produce spooky eerie images because of the light. Its a delicate balance.
• Close up candlelight gives good catch lights in the eyes. This makes the eyes look sharper, despite a very wide aperture being used.
  
• High ISO settings, together with a wide aperture, are required to allow a suitable shutter speed for a human subject (especially a young one). I chose ISO 800 for the close ups and ISO 3200 for those where the background was included. All pictures were taken with my 50mm f1.8 lens wide open.

Regarding the photos taken with the tungsten lighting, the room was lit with a ceiling light of 100W and a small bedside lamp of 40W. Key learning outcomes were as follows:

• Daylight balance with flash produced an image virtually colourless with a slight hint of a blue cast. This was because the flash (which is daylight balanced) overwhelmed the tungsten lighting, thereby removing the orange cast, but a slight blue cast arose due to the mixing of 2 different lighting sources. This is a common issue in indoor lighting.
• Daylight balance without flash produced a very warm orange/yellow image. I didn't think this was particularly offensive, because the setting of the room was included in the image, so it had quite a cosy feel. A close up portrait would have looked a bit strange with this lighting.
• Secondary light sources, such as a bedside lamp, end up overexposed, but this is not necessarily a negative in a picture. The radiating light from the bedside lamp creates an interesting effect, and also demonstrates how weak it is.
  
• Tungsten balance at +1 EV gave the most colourless image. I think this is because the slightly higher exposure would cause any colour cast to be weaker (thinking back to earlier projects on colour where underexposure intensified the colours). The image at 0 EV is also acceptable I thought.
• Using tungsten balance with flash produces a very blue image which is unusable. This is because the flash overwhelms the weaker tungsten lighting so the effect of the tungsten balance is to add a blue cast to neutralise an orange colour that isn't there. Once again, underexposing the image by 1 stop resulted in the colour from the cast being intensified.
  

Although this project seemed a little tedious at first, I feel like a light bulb has gone on (excuse the pun!) in my head in terms of understanding how white balance settings work. This was something I didn't totally grasp during my previous open university course on photography but it feels much more intuitive now. I think my results also demonstrate how the colour of lights can be used to create atmosphere (especially candlelight) but the effect must be used with care or it can spoil an image.