leave your white balance on auto

I know, everyone always says that your auto white balance isn’t any good. And partly it’s true, it can be way off. And that’s also the beauty of it since I only recommend shooting in auto white balance when you shoot in RAW. Because when you shoot in RAW your in-camera white balance does not really matter, you can change it afterwards without compromising the image quality.

Now back to why you can shoot auto white balance: it messes things up up. For example this photo:

With the correct white balance it looks way warmer and greener. Which would have been fine, but with the blue hint the photo looks better (to me). I do not think I would have come up with this result myself. I probably would have fine tuned my white balance to make it correct and the photo would look less alien. But with photos like this, when your white balance is off, sometimes it gives you a tip how you could process your photograph.

On the other hand, when you are on an assignment and you want to do as little post production as possible, you probably want to fine tune your white balance in camera. But if you’re shooting for yourself and you want to “develop” your photos anyway, you can try auto white balance.

Thanks for reading,

Koen

macro photography

As a frequent viewer of my stream you’ve probably noticed that I have been doing a lot of macro photography lately. This is mainly caused because I’m out of landscape subjects. Everything is really far away, or I have been there over 50 times with all the possible weather conditions. I just moved to macro photography because that’s a new world to me. And I thought it might be time to share some things I have learned.

• Bring an envelope, seriously even if your bag is as full as can be there’s always room for an folded envelope. Since your photographing small things anyway you can use this as an reflector. As a bonus you can fold the envelope a bit creating a smaller part which is in the reflected light.

• Don’t be afraid to get bit. This mind sound a little extreme, but if you’re calm on the ground and pay attention to any biting bugs on your clothes etc. you can keep the amount of bits to a minimum. But what might help is bring a sheet or something else to lay on. And if you’re from the Netherlands you’re lucky, if you’re bit by a red ant you won’t even feel it the next day. (I don’t dare to say anything about other countries though).
• Be aware for ticks, check yourself after every photo session. To get a bite for a photo is one thing, but it’s something else to get lyme disease.

• A bean bag is more useful than a tripod. You will be laying on the ground photographing things which are really low to the ground as well. It is hard to get as low with a tripod as you can get with a bean bag, and it’s more comfortable.

• Shoot in bursts: this might seem weird, but if you don’t want to open up your aperture more / raise your iso but you do want to get a sharp photo of a flower swinging in the wind you can use the burst mode. Because the flower moves less fast at the end of it’s motion and than you will be able to get a sharp photo.

• Look for points of attention. Because of the large magnification you basically take a landscape photo of a flower. It might not be clear to the viewer where he has to look at, so add something to the flower, like bugs or waterdrops.

• Raise your ISO before you open up your aperture. Besides that it becomes harder to get things in focus, your DoF becomes also extremely small. Be sure that you use a adequate aperture for your main subject to be in focus.

And as far as I can help you with finding subjects, well just lay on the ground and look through your macrolens/ pimped lens. Virtually anything can become interesting, and there might just be something going on there with the bugs. All the bug photos you have seen here are taken because I was already laying on the ground.

Thanks for reading