4

CHAPTER
NIGHT AND LOW-LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY / People and Places Indoors

room, set the white balance on your camera to

Auto and just take a photo of a room with mixed

light sources, and then check the image on the

back of the camera. You will see that the different

light sources color the different areas and they

don’t match, especially when you add fluorescent

lights into the mix.

A well-lit room can have a mix of light that can

look natural, especially if the lighting is all close

in temperature on the Kelvin scale. An example

of this is shown in Figure 4-18 where there is

As the photographer, you need to make a deci-
sion: which of the light sources do you set the
camera to in order to record correctly, and which
do you ignore. It is not possible to set the camera
for two different white balances at the same time.
To see the different colors of light in the same

ABOUT THIS PHOTO The same kitchen photographed at a different angle and from a lower perspective using a 12mm lens instead of a
10.5mm fisheye lens; this improved the look and feel of the image. The flash reflection can no longer be seen in the image. Taken at 1/60 second,
f/4.0, and ISO 100.

4-17

Your brain and eyes automatically

adjust to different light sources and

can even adjust to mixed light sources, while your cam-

era doesn’t.

note