Filmmaking 101: White Balance

Filmmaking 101: White Balance

Welcome to Brading images. We are a Photography and Videography studio in Manchester, Salford, Irlam. We primarily do music videos and family photoshoots in the studio. We particularly enjoying doing: Newborn photoshoots, one year old photoshoots, toddler photoshoots, kids photoshoots, fairy photoshoots, mother daughter photoshoots, maternity photoshoots and siblings photoshoots, here, in manchester!

Outside the studio, we run a film club called The Stage and Screen Academy, where we teach filmmaking 101.

Did you know that white is not always white? White objects are actually the colour of the light that is hitting them – and light can be different colours depending on where it is coming from.

Colour temperature is how we can measure what shade of white is being produced by a specific light source and is measured in Kelvin and ranges from candlelight at 1000 Kelvin, to a Blue Sky at 10,00 Kelvin. Low colour temperatures are more yellow and high colour temperatures more blue.

The light that you see outside on a cloudy day, is known as daylight and this has a colour temperature of 5600 Kelvin. You’ll find that this is a bluish light

The light coming from your lightbulbs at home, will be known as tungsten and is 3200 Kelvin. This light will seem more yellow.

This is something that we, as humans, don’t usually have to pay attention to, but cameras are very sensitive to it and have to be told what colour white should be. This is known as white balance.

Cameras have different ways of setting white balance – you might need to point the camera at a white piece of paper, use a white balance preset, or dial in the exact colour temperature of the scene. If you get the white balance wrong, your scene will look either too yellow or too blue.

Cameras can only be set to one white balance at a time, so when you are filming, think about where the main light is coming from and try not to use different types of lights for a scene. For example, a common issue is shooting indoors under light bulbs, but next to a window. The light coming through the window will look blue and might ruin your shot.

So let’s recap – different light sources produce different colours of light – known as colour temperature. You camera must be told what colour temperature the scene is being lit by in order for the shot to look natural – this is known as white balance

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