considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

The question comes up: what is white balance? Two responses: First: White is the wrong word. "White balance" as a term of digital photography refers to the color feeling, color emotion, color balance in the photo.

This weekend several students wrote to ask why their pictures are so dark. Right on time! This is the point in the term when that question always surfaces. As soon as we start printing in earnest, the abstraction of camera exposure takes on a newly practical necessity. It seems that no matter how shutter speeds and f-stops are explained, the need for a correctly balanced exposure suddenly becomes urgent once the picture becomes physical as a paper object. These days I'm primarily teaching with digital cameras, but the dynamic is similar when teaching film photography. Whether in a darkroom or in a computer lab, it's not until you give up trying to print an underexposed frame that you return to the basics of proper exposure. The tools different, of course, but in this basic fundamental they are remarkably similar: exposure is key, and underexposure is deadly. Drilling yourself in the basics of exposure is a good way to start understanding the tools of photography. Whether you...

...make pictures. We do a lot of other stuff too. We wake up, get our coffee, take a shower, get the kids to school, go to work. We do stuff we want to do, stuff we don't want to do. We also do nothing, and think about doing nothing. And we do pictures. A lot of the stuff we do is driven by clearly defined motivations -- wake-up, eat, work, sleep -- and sometimes picture-making is too, but not always. I have to convince you to buy the stuff I sell: make a picture. I have to convince you to vote for my guy: make a picture. I have to convince myself I'm having a good time: make a picture. I have to convince you I love you. When I teach photography, the goal is to put away the camera and slow up, slow down, draw out the motivations that drive us to make pictures. What do we want from this thing that we do? My favorite day is when we put our pictures on the board, step back, take a breath, and talk about the journey.