Photography Basics 8 – Balancing Ambient Light With Flash

When you’re using flash indoors with the lights on the chances are that the available (or ambient) light will be warm. Most houses, restaurants etc tend to use this type of lighting because it’s more inviting than lighting which balanced for daylight (which is cooler).

When you’re using flash (which is balanced similar to daylight) in warm lit settings you have two (or more) different colour temperatures to consider.  Bear in mind that you need to expose for the ambient light first and use the flash as a fill light. In this way you’re able to correctly expose the subject(s) and the background. If you rely on the flash to light the whole scene and don’t expose for the ambient light you run the risk of a dark or black background if the room is large or the flash isn’t powerful enough.     

The first picture is a shot of a room as I saw it. The ambient lighting is very warm with a yellow cast.

In the second I used fill in flash with the white balance set to flash.   As you can see the skin tones are too red, the white shirt has a slightly warm colour cast whilst the background appears slightly cooler.

In the third I used the same set up but this time I set the white balance to tungsten. This time the skin tones and shirt have a bluish colour cast and the background is less yellow which I what I’d expect as the tungsten setting gives a cooler colour temperature.

In the final picture I used a 0.5 CTO (Colour Temperature Orange) gel (they come in different strengths) on the flash and set the white balance to tungsten. Skin tones appear natural and the shirt appears white and this is what I wanted to achieve.  The background appears cooler but that isn’t as important as skin tones and whites appearing as they should.

There’s usually a trade off when you’re trying to balance lights with different colour temperatures so you need to make a judgement on how you’d like the final shot to look. If you find that you have so many colour temperatures that you can’t get the look that you want then you can convert the picture to black and white which will solve the issue.                      

If you’d like to know more about this and other aspects of photography there are more details here

Antony