white balance

White Balance:  "Normally our eyes compensate for lighting conditions with different color temperatures. A digital camera needs to find a reference point which represents white. It will then calculate all the other colors based on this white point. For instance, if a halogen light illuminates a white wall, the wall will have a yellow cast, while in fact it should be white. So if the camera knows the wall is supposed to be white, it will then compensate all the other colors in the scene accordingly" (http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glossary/Digital_Imaging/White_Balance_01.htm).

So, what does that mean? Basically if your white balance isn't set correctly your pictures will look like they're tinted and all of the colors won't look right.... 

For example: I went with my friend Lauralai to the Morikami Japanese Museum and Gardens a few weeks ago (I'm a member there, in case you're wondering why it appears so often in my photos).   I attempted to manually set the white balance to what I thought was correct for being outdoors in natural sun light.  I was wrong.   As you can see, everything came out looking like it was tinted blue.

Normally, I would continue to try different settings until I get it correct but it was really hot and humid and I wanted to make sure that we some good shots so that Lauralai could give them to her parents, so for both of our sakes I changed the white balance setting back to auto for the time being...

Here are the results of the day:

You may have won this round, white balance, but I'm not done with you yet!

And thanks to Lauralai for being a great subject and for letting me post these pictures!