White Balance

White balance is the act of giving the camera a reference of "true white" meaning the camera can give a fully colour balanced shot. Giving the camera a reference of white means that it will record white correctly, thus will record all colour correctly as white is all colours.
It is important to white balance whenever the lighting conditions change, especially for going from shooting indoors to shooting outdoors. This is also important for early morning and late evening as the light colour changes quickly, despite our eyes not noticing, the cameras do.

To perform a manual white balance you must first make sure that your camera is set to the correct filter for lighting technicians. Then you should point the camera at a pure white subject, ideally a plain white sheet of paper as it is matte, thus non-reflective.
Then you should set your focus, followed by activating the white balance button. This should take a few seconds and your camera will inform you when it has completed the process.

In our lesson we also experimented with changing the colour of the shot by exploiting the white balance setting.
The process is almost the same but rather than using a piece of white paper you use a coloured gel (normally intended for lighting) or a coloured piece of paper. However the colour of the paper will not create the same colour for the shot but rather the opposite, so a blue sheet of paper or gel would result in the shot being warm (red or orange) whilst a red gel or paper would result in the shot being cold (blue).
The results of using green is a purple or pink shot and vice-versa.