On my recent trip to Japan, I made a classic error that for someone-who-is-supposed-to-know-what-they-are-doing is unforgiveable.

Check out the shot below. You’ll notice it has a rather blue tinge to it; this makes the shot essentially useless as I am assured by experts that not even the magic of Photoshop can rectify this. The best I can get, I am told, is to play around with it to make a decent black and white shot.

To say I was peeved is an understatement. Sadly, they were taken from the Bullet Train – the Shinkansen (and highly recommended at that. The sooner a Sydney – Canberra – Melbourne one the better) and the cabin light was dim so not until back in bright sunlight did I see the error.

So what caused it?

On most cameras, you have the option of setting what is known as “white balance”. Essentially, this is to tell the camera what colour “white is” under the current lighting conditions such as fluorescent, bright sunlight and so on. I hadn’t checked this before shooting (the camera was a loaner Nikon D7000 with a 28~300mm lens) assuming that it was set at auto. As it turns out, it was set to incandescent so all other colours were skewed that way.

The second error, and I plead slightly not guilty here as I am more used to video these days than stills, was not changing the camera from shooting JPEG to RAW format.

I don’t know when or if I’ll ever get back to Japan to try and shoot Mt Fuji again. I hope so, because if not, for the sake of a little preparation, I would have had much better memory shots to show off. These I’ll tuck away somewhere.

Setting the white balance is easy. You can either use a piece of white card and go into the white balance settings (this depends on your camera/camcorder - yes camcorders have this too) or simply set it to auto. See a short video on this here.

By David Hague

David is the owner and publisher of AusCam Online. He has a background in media dating back to 1979 when he first got involved with photojournalism in motorsport, and went from there into technology via a 5 year stint with Tandy Computers. Following that, he ran a software distribution company on the Gold Coast and was one of the first to recognise the potential of Microsoft Windows.

Moving back to WA, David wrote scripts for Computer Television for video training for the just released Windows and Office 95 among others, and was then lured to Sydney to create web sites for the newly commercial Internet in 1995, building hundreds of sites under contract to OzEmail including Coates Hire, Hertz Queensland, John Williamson, the NSW Board of Studies and many, many more.

He went back into full time journalism as the Managing Editor for Channel 7's 'Gadget Guy', Peter Blasina's publications VideoCamera and Pixelmag, before starting Australasian Camcorder magazine when these publications were shelved. He lives at Sydney's Avalon Beaches nearly on the ocean front with dog Budweiser and in his spare time is a nut for motor sport, road safety, fishing, science fiction - especially Dr Who - and technology.

David can be contacted via david@auscamonline.com