More White Balance

Fluorescent Light WB setting

AWB

Comparing the WB setting for fluorescent light to the automatic setting. Looks warmer and less harsh, but I wouldn't say that the auto shot looks unnatural - guess that shows it's doing a pretty good job on its own.

Colour Temperature & White Balance

We recognise colours for what they are regardless of the lighting conditions, but different kinds of light have different colours or 'colour temperature' - describes the proportion of primary colours (RGB) that exist in a particular light source. High colour temperature light contains more blue while low colour temperature light contains more red. Digital cameras make automatic adjustments to the red, blue & green in order that the image appears more natural, using the white in the subject as the basis for the adjustment. This is handled by the automatic white balance (AWB) setting mostly, but manual options are available to provide better control.

- paraphrased from Hedgecoe & Canon camera manual

AWB

Tungsten

Ordinary bulbs tend to give an orange glow to a shot - the second shot was taken with the WB set to Tungsten to compensate for this. Not sure if I prefer this or not (looks a bit green to me) but you can see what's going on. Both images 1/25s, f/5.6, ISO 400.

Flash Exposure Compensation

Happened to mention to someone the other day how much I hate using flash because of how it just washes out images and he suggested I try turning it down - something I didn't know I could do. So here's my simple exercise in playing with flash exposure compensation. Each image was taken with the flash exposure compensation incremented by 1 stop. All taken on aperture priority mode; f/5.6, ISO 400.

No Flash, 2.0s

Flash -2 stops, 1.0s

Flash -1 stop, 1.0s

Flash 0 compensation, 1.0s

Flash +1 stop, 1.0s

Flash +2 stops, 1.0s

Zoom Burst II

All except bottom image: 1/15s, f/5.6, ISO 400 (Bottom Image f/5.0)
Found it easier shooting with a larger aperture and faster shutter speed - these were taken without a tripod. And I think the effect works better with a smaller depth of field.