Improve your food iPhoneography with the Camera+ white balance lock

iPhone Photography Series

If you remember our last lesson in iPhone Photography, we learned a bit about white balance and how to control it using KitCam. In that lesson I mentioned using Camera+ as an app to control white balance. I thought in today’s lesson we would extend our understanding and take a look at Camera+’s way.

In our last lesson, we looked at controlling white balance by setting the appropriate light source that was illuminating the scene (i.e. sunlight, fluorescent light, incandescent light, etc…) . With Camera+ we do it a little differently…

Have you ever used Camera+ and wondered what the WB lock icon is all about? It does what the name implies. It locks the white balance setting! If you lock it, it will apply the same white balance setting to all your photographs until it is unlocked, even if the light source changes.

So how or why would we use this feature? In our previous lesson I showed you how to use different white balance setting to enhance sunsets. But what if you don’t know what the light source is, or you want to fine tune it a bit. Knowing that there a lot of foodies out there who love to share their meals on IG, I figured it would be a good idea to show you a little trick that will make the colors of your dinner accurate.

The way the white balance lock works in Camera+ is pretty simple. I’ll show you how it works with a seasonally appropriate cup of hot coco.

Let’s fire up Camera+ and get ready to take a photo.

Step 1: Tap the screen to get your focus selector set, then tap the ‘+’ icon to bring up the exposure selector.

Step 2: At this point you can set your focus and exposure by moving the two selectors around.

Step 3: Here’s the trick! The exposure selector serves as both the exposure and white balance selector. You will want to choose a neutral color in the scene (say a white napkin) and then lock the white balance. This is tricky, and it doesn’t always work the first time. Continue to move the exposure selector around until you get an accurate white balance reading. You’ll know when you do once whites look white. Once you do, lock it!

Step 4: Now that you have an accurate white balance set and locked, you can remove the napkin or recompose your photo to make the perfect photo of your food.

Assignment

Alright, now that we have a new tool in our creative tool chest, let’s get out there and use it. By no means to you have to photograph food, but make make sure to tag all your photos with #iDBWBLock. That way we can follow along and see how you are using this creative technique. Have fun in 2013 and keep your creativity flowing my friends!

Justin Balog is an award winning photographer and film maker. You can follow is daily creative adventures at HOSSedia.com or learn more about iPhone Photography in his iBook ‘Big World Little Lens‘. Click Here for the iPad Version. To find out more about Justin, follow him on Twitter and Facebook.