Color Photography Assignment: White Balance

White balance is one of the most effective ways to control color and one of the greatest sources of confusion for people who learn about it. Understanding white balance to the point where you can use it as a creative tool should be the goal of all who work in color digital photography.

The term white balance applies to a setting made in your camera. Think of white balance as an expectation. When your camera's white balance is set to daylight, it expects that whatever you are shooting is lit by the sun. When you set it to tungsten, it expects that the scene will be lit by a standard Edison Base Tungsten Filament light bulb. If you set your camera to one of these settings, but shoot under candlelight or fluorescent light instead, the camera doesn't get what it is expecting, and a white balance mismatch occurs. The result is that your photograph will have a colorcast. 

Here are the instructions for this assignment:

Shoot 7 different images. These can be all of the same scene or of any combination of the same and different scenes. Shooting all images of the same scene is much more difficult and requires both a greater understanding of white balance and access to a variety of different light sources that can be made to shine on the same location.
Set your white balance to custom for all shots. No auto white balance. It is strongly suggested that you meter using an external meter as opposed to using the matrix meter in the camera.
Use custom white balance to render the scenes in the following manner:
* Shot 1: This shot should have a neutral white balance.
* Shot 2: This shot should have a distinctly red colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 3: This shot should have a distinctly green colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 4: This shot should have a distinctly blue colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 5: This shot should have a distinctly cyan colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 6: This shot should have a distinctly magenta colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 7: This shot should have a distinctly yellow colorcast throughout the image