Get Your Whites Their Whitest ...

I'm not a big fan of doing laundry -- just ask Amina. Sure, I can cook, I like to clean my house and mowing the grass can be fun. But laundry?

Sorry. Too many rules, too many things to think about: can I wash this with that? Is this a delicate or just a tattered old t-shirt? Can I mix whites and colors? Well, on that last question, I know the answer: throw a red t-shirt in a load of white towels and the whites don't look white any more.

There's a photography lesson in here, believe it or not.

What Color is "White?"
The brain is an amazing computer. It processes millions of bits of information per second and somehow manages to make logical, life-affirming decisions out of the data (unless a wine tasting is involved). One of the things the brain tells us is color, which can be pretty important -- "Should I eat that green bread?" is an important question because, well, most bread isn't green. Knowing what "green" is helps make the more important decision of whether green is good to eat. In this case it probably isn't, though when I was a bachelor I might have made a different decision ...

Think of white as the constant color -- we can argue all day about what shade of blue or green a paint chip shows, or whether the "Midnight Blue" color of your car is actually closer to a purple. White is white, and if that's a constant, then we can judge all other colors around it. (This paragraph deliberately ignores color theory, because it's a huge ball of wax and tends to start fistfights among color nerds.)

Most digital SLRs -- meaning, "a camera where the lens comes off" -- have what's called a white balance setting, and it's critical to taking a good photograph. Why?

White in natural sunlight looks different than, say, white in your living room at 9 p.m. with reading lamps, or white at 9 p.m. in your living room with lamps and the built-in flash firing ... When you set the white balance, you're telling the camera how to compensate for the light surrounding your subject.

Consider this photo; I took it with afternoon sun streaming into my dining room, so I set my white balance for "sunlight" and fired away. My camera decided "white" for that scene, and adjusted the other colors accordingly.



Now, consider this:



Same photo, but a different white balance. In this case, I told my photo editing software to automatically figure out the white balance. Looks cooler, doesn't it? And by "cooler" I mean "a less warm color" -- this version adds much more blue to the background.

Which one is right? I'd say the first one is a more accurate representation of what my eye saw. It's warmer, which gives a greater sense of time and place -- 3 p.m. afternoon sun on a gorgeous January afternoon. But the second one seems to show more of the delicacy of the tulip bulb; it hints at the inevitable demise of the cut flower as it droops closer to the ground, and shows a better range of colors with the tulip in the background.

There isn't a "right" answer -- it's art, fer cryin' out loud! -- and that's what makes photography fun. Understanding white balance does allow you to control the shot, which is critical to getting the photo you saw in your mind's eye.