Exercise: tungsten and Fluorescent lighting and digital cameras

It seems that the aim of this exercise is to get us to start appreciating the colour of light and learning how to tackle difficult lighting environments where one is faced with different coloured light sources, like daylight and tungsten, for instance.

Before starting this exercise I would like to point out that since 2009 incandescent tungsten lamps have been undergoing a phasing out period and are  now exceptionally rare... you will still find them in homes but less so as more and more homeowners are obliged to use energy saver fluorescent bulbs as substitutes. The photos I took where with fluorescents bulbs but the same principles apply. I have also taken a photo where both light bulbs were being used and it's interesting to see the difference in colour between fluorescent and tungsten bulbs. the fluorescent, as you can see are more turquoise, or blue green biased.

f 7.1; 1/250 ISO800

I did originally compose a still life as suggested making use of internal and external lighting and was going to use a set of 3 images as suggested, but yesterday I was photographing my cousin's sons 3rd birthday party and by chance took a photograph of the entertainer against a window (almost contre jour, but not quite) and because of the heavy snow, it accentuated the different colours between indoor and outside lighting. I have used the same photo here and altered the white balance setting in Lightroom instead. The photo was shot in RAW so effectively it allows me to create 3 different images as though they were taken 3 times at different WB  settings, but this is the same image with the WB changes made Lightroom.

Image 1: WB set manually in camera using a custom setting by taking a photo of a white card:

You can see from the photo that while the camera has adjusted the colour setting of the internal light to give a white light effect, outside everything appears blue, despite the eye registering it as white

Image 2: WB set in LR4 to daylight:

This time round you will notice that while outside appears natural, everything inside has taken on a golden hue

Image 3: WB set to Fluorescent:

This WB setting almost fixes the colour issues but doesn't remove the blue outside.

Image 4:  WB set to Auto

This setting, strangely enough, is no worse than the fluorescent setting and there is little difference between auto and fluorescent! Although I tend to avoid automatic WB  settings clearly in this instance it has worked satisfactorily.

What I chose to do, in this instance was use the custom setting and then in LR4 desaturate the blues to remove the blue from outside, as you can see below. It has left the outside looking desaturated of colour but that's not necessarily bad and avoids what's going on outside competing with the subject for the viewer's attention

In conclusion, relying on the camera's built in WB settings may not always be a bad thing especially in tricky lighting situations where you won't necessarily be able to accurately capture the colour range because the dynamics are too wide for the camera. In these instances, it is still best to use a custom setting but if you have to, using auto WB can still be useful and no worse than one of the other camera settings.