Travel Photography Tips – DSLR White Balance Setting Explained

I have recently posted a White Balance setting explained for DSLR write-up on my photography blog. For those who are still wondering what is White Balance and why it exists in digital cameras, check it out now before you find out that your travel photos are all lacking some eye-catching elements.

Why setting White Balance is so important in travel photography to me? I’m passionate in taking photos on travel. I advocate capturing what a travel scene looks like in actual, no better, no worse. In order to achieve that, setting my Nikon D7000 White Balance (WB) manually is sometimes unavoidable. Capturing sunset during my recent trip to Port Dickson for instance, leaving my camera in Auto WB mode didn’t able to satisfactorily capture the dramatic sunset colours as what I saw in actual. I had to manually tweak the WB setting to deliver what you see here as below.

This beautiful sunset is exactly what I saw in actual. If I shot it in RAW and set the White Balance later in editor, I would had forgotten how the actual colours looked like and would not be able to produce back the same rich reds and orange. Then what’s the point of taking travel photos if I can’t record down what I see? Unless I shoot both JPEG and RAW, but then I need to double my SDHC cards capacity!

However, there are exceptions.

After shooting with the correct WB setting on the above typical KL city skyline scene at dusk, I may feel like being naughty to take another few shots with WB presets, such as Shade, Cloudy or Tungsten WB, to produce something dramatic, like the one below… 🙂

There is no right or wrong WB to use in shooting photos with DSLR. As long as you like the end result, it would be your preferred WB setting. To see how an image would turn out with different WB presets, check out my in-depth White Balance setting explanation. – Travel Feeder, your ultimate photo travel blog

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.