Digital Photography starts with lighting

You need light, some kind of light to create a photograph. Knowing what kind of light you're working with will allow you to better control what kind of image you create.

Working indoors, you'll usually be dealing with tungsten lighting (round bulbs) or fluorescent lights (long tubes). When outside you'll usually be working with daylight or high pressure sodium street lamps as your main light.

Knowing the type of light you're working with will allow you to white balance your camera so the colors turn out the way you intend. If you're shooting in daylight, your camera will probably have several settings to choose from including: daylight, overcast, and/or shadow. Depending on the intensity of the daylight you happen to be shooting in, these three settings will control the "warmth" or the amount of orangeness included in your pictures.

If you have your camera set to daylight, but you're actually shooting in the shade, your photos will tend to have a slight bluish color also referred to as hue. The overall picture comes off being cool. If you were to instead, set the camera to Shadow, your camera would add a light yellow and red to the shot, "warming" it up, hopefully capturing the image with a more pleasant, palatable hue. If you test this on your own camera, keep in mind the differences between the two images may appear very slight, and would best be viewed on your computer screen instead of the on camera display.

When composing an image with different types of light sources be prepared to make compromises. For instance, if your shooting indoors with tungsten bulbs and daylight is coming through a window, setting your camera to a Tungsten White Balance will cause the light coming through the window to cast a bluish hue onto your image. As long as you know this lighting effect is going to happen, you can compose your shot appropriately to the most of this bluish color cast, make the decision to alter the lighting, if you can by closing a window shade, or to move the location of the shot to where the bluish cast is more negligible. Whatever you decide on, you will be the one controlling the shot and not being caught off guard with a surprising color cast.

When shooting in multiple types of light sources, look to see if there is a predominantly stronger light type. For example: if the room you are shooting in happens to be primarily lit by fluorescent lights, and has tungsten light sporadically in the room, you might choose to white balance your camera for Fluorescent lights, knowing that the tungsten lights will add warm spots of interest in your composition, since the tungsten lights will cast a warm orange glow in their vicinity.

Once you have determined the White Balancing to use for the camera, take a shot with the proper exposure and see if your lighting turned out the way you had intended. Sometimes shooting the same image with two differing White Balance settings will reveal a more creative composition with a white balance setting you initially thought would not work. While shooting a wedding last summer, I set the white balance to Daylight, even though most of the church was being lit by the tungsten lights suspended from the ceiling. The Daylilght balanced shot added more warmth to the shot, which really added to the gilding on the cross and altar of the church. The Tungsten balanced shot was just ok, and properly exposed. But the Daylight balanced shot looked angelic and dramatic, definitely the way to go for this shot.

Know your light, experiment with different white balance settings, and happy shooting.