Color balance in photography is a subtle thing. You can easily find a lot of arguments online about the subject, and most of them assume that there is a “correct” white balance for any given situation. What is color balance? Simply put, color balance relates to how much emphasis your camera, or monitor, places on different colors across the spectrum. Both cameras and monitors use Red, Green and Blue color elements to create the full set of colors you see in nature. If you add a little extra blue to all of the colors in an image, the whole image will take on a bluer appearance and this would be an example of a “blue shifted” color balance.

I used to spend time in post processing tweaking the color balance of my images to make them “correct”, where by correct I mean that things which I thought should be white appeared white. But as I collected and examined more photographs of scenes in wooded areas where there was a lot of shade, I noticed that my camera consistently choose a color balance that seemed too blue to my eye. So then I started to pay more attention to what I was seeing out on the trails, and making more direct comparisons between the colors my eyes were seeing and what appeared in the view finder of the camera. I have come to the conclusion that bluer color balance of the “uncorrected” image on the left is actually a more accurate representation of how this foliage looked when the photograph was taken than the “corrected” image on the right.

What is up here? Am I just bad at seeing color? Possibly, but in this case I do not think so. Turns out that human color perception is a complicated and subtle thing. Our brains are constantly “post processing” the information which comes from the color sensors in the eyes, including applying a form of color balance “correction” to make things appear as what it thinks is “right”. You can see this effect by putting on a pair of sunglasses which have an amber tint. Pay attention to how the colors of what you see changes as soon as you put the sunglasses on. Then keep paying attention. What you might notice is that a short time after putting on the sunglasses, all of the colors you see appear “normal”. Then when you then remove the glasses everything looks off again, but just for a moment. Your brain has an idea of how things “should” look, and when things are off it actually makes corrections so that everything appears normal to it.

For this reason, as well as other things related to the theory of color mixing, defining what the “correct” color balance of a scene is not as straight forward as one might assume. Photographers often use a technical definition of correct color balance which specifies how much red, green and blue should appear in a photograph of a card which has been colored a specific shade of gray. But is this really how the colors of a given scene actually appear?

Going back to the images at the beginning of this post, keep in mind that when I took the photograph I was standing in a wooded area which was heavily shaded by the leaves on the trees that made up the canopy. Plus, almost all of the surrounding surfaces which might reflect light back onto the scene were themselves green. What you have is a situation where much of the red and blue light which hit the top of the tree canopy was filtered out by the green leaves. This filtering effect is then amplified by the fact that the surrounding foliage tends to reflect green. So in terms of the balance of the colors reaching my eyes in that location in that moment, a white object does indeed have a bluish-green cast to it.

All of this is really just a long winded way of saying that I prefer the image on the left. As far as I am concerned it depicts more accurately the range of colors which were present in the scene. It is also gives a bit of insight into why I enjoy returning to the same locations many times over multiple years for the purpose of taking photographs. The more time you spend with a subject the more you learn about it, and that changes how you see what you see which is a process that I find fascinating. Each time I revisit an area in the Dunes I find myself observing the same things in different ways, and pondering the wonders of the natural world from different points of view, seeing things through different color balances as it were…

As a nature photographer my goal is to capture images of scenes that effectively convey what I was seeing in that moment.

P.S. If you are interested in learning more about color perception and color balance these two wikipedia links are a good starting point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_balance