White Balance in Photography

I have always been interested in photography, that is how I ended up couriering 5Kgs of snaps when I came back to Bangalore from Holland. But that was the time before I got myself a digital camera. My familiarity with digital cameras were limited to the ones I saw with the Japanese tourists in Bruges. Now that I have moved to a DSLR (thanks to Shyam), there is so much more I can do in photography. But I am a novice here and am learning every day, or at least every day I pick up the camera. So here is one I have learned recently. Setting the correct white balance in the camera.

There are a lot of articles about white balance available already in the web. So by repeating those I am not writing anything new. In case you are interested check these links out.

Digital Photography School

School of Digital Photography

When I have seen the instructions for setting the white balance in the tutorial video, being the lazy bum I am, I said how much difference can it make anyway. Oh ya, of course I have seen the pictures, but remember, I am terribly lazy. 

So when I took this picture, I said there is something wrong, the colors are not bright enough, they should be springing out at me. So I decided to try setting the white balance in my camera. I tried focusing on a white paper and set it, I thought it was not very accurate. So I cut off a small piece of wax paper, stuffed it inside my UV filter and set the white balance and tried it. Here are the results. I guess, this actually is going to make me set the white balance every time I am going to do any serious photography.