Infrared shooting techniques
Now that you’ve learned all of the infrared photography theory, it is important to supplement your new-found knowledge with practical infrared photography shooting techniques. You can find out more about these techniques in this chapter.
Importance of white balance
White balance is the camera setting that controls the overall color tone of your final picture. It works by telling the camera’s sensor what it should consider to be white, and adjusts other colors from there.
For example, a white piece of paper appears more yellow under sunlight – if the white balance was not changed then all white in the picture would appear yellowed, which would produce a picture that wouldn’t be nice to look at, and would look ‘wrong’ in terms of color.
In terms of infrared, white balance is necessary because infrared is recorded primarily in the sensor’s red channel. The images will therefore appear to be very red. It is best to set a custom white balance so that the image appears more ‘normal’ in terms of color and tone, rather than having an overwhelmingly red cast.
