In representational painting, one of the first things you have to learn is that a white object is never actually white. It always takes on some of the color of the light that hits it and reflects back to the viewer’s eye.
Seems simple enough, but the brain jumps through many hoops to disregard this color information, probably to make life easier for us all. The brain’s so good at this that the only way I know of to see a “white” object’s (or any object’s) true color is by looking through a little hole punched in the middle of a neutral gray card aimed at the object. Painters sometimes use these, and the first time I tried it I was blown away by all the different colors “white” objects actually are.
Most of the time, not noticing or even knowing about all this just makes life less complicated, especially when there are many more important things to worry about. But good photographs are not about most of the time. They’re about the drama, the serenity, the infinite emotions light evokes.
Yet unfortunately, light’s sublime nature is often unthinkingly denuded out of a photograph with the white balance tools without asking why first.
Sure, sometimes it’s necessary. A white shirt in a catalog should probably look as white as possible. And when the light—especially artificial light--hitting an object or person is ugly and only makes things worse, getting rid of it with white balance can save something of the photo.
But it’s never necessary to do so out of laziness or habit or in appeasement of the left brain’s demand for whites to be white. If photography is about light, photographers need to do better than that.
Near my house there’s a white stucco wall that, in the summer, gets both blue light from the sky and reddish light from clouds lit by a setting sun. This mixture creates the most beautiful, ethereal magenta I’ve ever seen. It only lasts a few moments, and I’ve never been able to capture it fully with a photograph, but I can keep trying.
Color photography is about the infinite and fleeting flavors of light, and not about the plain vanilla of white balance. Embrace the color of light, like Riccardo Bernardi does here for Schön! Magazine
