I will be honest…. white balance is my weakness. I understand shutter speed, aperture, ISO speed, how to do AF point selection, manual focus, etc. But having to deal with white balance? Uhhh…. Excuse me while I run out of the room.

Last Saturday, I shot in digital at a birthday party… and auto white balance failed me. In part because of the yellow walls and yellow lighting, but goodness, I even knew I would be post-processing to correct it…mistake! I really should have taken the time to manually set the white balance. Probably even adjusting to fluorescent would have made it better (duh). Although even in the rooms when I was standing around, I could see with my own eyes the yellow cast that the lights and wall colors were casting on the people. I like the colors for their warmth, but photographing after sunset in the different rooms is a real challenge sometimes.

I have the vision for how I want my images to look, but I still have a lot of technical things to work out – like how to achieve that vision through camera and editing functions. I think I mentally shut down when it comes to learning all the ins and outs of post-processing (it can be a bit overwhelming). I want to have great images SOOC, but sometimes I am at a loss of how to achieve what I envision. (This is why I keep shooting even I just come away with images of leaves and water…. practice! practice!)

Okay, now onto the photographs. I have decided to split this event into two posts, because I think the birthday cake (a Disney castle!) deserves its own post and if I had all the images in one post, it would be very long. Below I have included the portraits and miscellaneous detail shots that I took. Because of the wrong white balance, I had to do some major adjusting and this is the closest that I could get.

Thank you for stopping by! The remaining photos from this party will be posted later on in the week – featuring a Disney castle cake!

Do not download/save, copy, crop, reproduce, or otherwise utilize these images without written permission (unless you are embedding linked images to your blog and you provide credit). All images are Copyright (c) Sarah Derr Photography. Thank you!