White Balance and Exposure Compensation

Last night's photography class topics covered exposure compensation and white balance. I found the part about exposure compensation especially interesting. As part of the in class shooting situations we had a scene that was predominantly white and one that was predominantly black and we had to do either an EV- or EV+ shift to make the exposure "look" correct as opposed to what the meter was showing as a correct exposure. The camera's metering system tries to average all the tones in a scene but this doesn't always work especially for really bright or really dark subjects. So for white subjects you would actually do exposure EV+ compensation by 1 or more stops and for blacks you would do EV- compensation by one or more stops. The next thing we did was try out several built in preset WB options on our cameras under different lighting situations. Afterwards we applied a custom WB setting using calibration from a grey card. The difference in some cases was amazing. The natural look of colors as they should be was obtained with the custom WB as opposed to either a yellowish or blueish cast to the image with any of the presets. So our assignments this week will be to find scenes that are dominantly light or dark in tone and correctly expose them plus try out a backlit scene and correctly expose it too. For practice with white balance we have to photograph subjects indoors with tungsten or flourescent light and subjects outside with natural light and try to white balance them accordingly. Here are a few pictures taken in the class exercise.