Ethiopia Photo Tour

Jan, 21 - Feb. 3, 2025

I use daylight white balance. You won’t see any difference in the color palette of your images between daylight white balance and AWB with pictures taken during the middle of the day, but at sunrise and sunset there will be a profound difference. Daylight WB shows you accurately what you’ve captured, and AWB doesn’t.

The only exception I make to this method of choosing the white balance is when I’m faced with a thick cloud, dim illumimation at dusk, or fog. The Kelvin temperature is high in those instances, and with a normal daylight WB the pictures tend to appear bluish. The shot at right of a Louisiana swamp illustrates this. In this situation, you could use cloudy white balance. For myself, I still shoot with daylight WB because I often like the subtle blue tones; they connote a certain mood.

I only use auto white balance when I’m shoot- ing in a mixed lighting environment. For example, the entrance to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, below, is illuminated by both tungsten lighting as well as by large windows that let daylight flood the interior. The combination of the two types of lighting is best photographed using AWB.

For interiors illuminated primarily by tungsten (incandescent) light bulbs, I shoot with tungsten WB (many cameras use the word ‘indoors’ to describe this kind of light). §