white balance

Step outside on a Highveld winter morning, turn towards the rising sun, and you will quickly see why backlight photography has such a devoted following. Low light filtering through dry, faintly dusty air outlines everything in its path, from grass stems to a passer-by’s hair. Pointing your lens towards the light can feel counter-intuitive at first, but once you understand the direction of light in photography and how your camera responds to it, backlight becomes one of the most rewarding tools available. This guide explains how backlight behaves, the two signature looks it produces, the camera settings that control it and how to apply it across five common subjects.

Backlight photography and the direction of light: front light vs backlight

Backlight photography and the direction of light

Photographers usually describe light by where it comes from relative to the camera. Front light falls on the subject from behind the photographer, giving even, shadow-free illumination but little sense

Picture a summer thunderstorm rolling across the Highveld at sunset, the sky shifting from deep purple to copper within minutes. Capture it as a JPEG and those subtle colours can band or burn out; capture it as a RAW photo and you keep far more information to work with later. Choosing between the two is one of the first decisions in RAW shooting. This guide explains how the two differ, the strengths and weaknesses of each, how processing works and the scenes where RAW makes the biggest difference.

What is a RAW photo, and what is RAW shooting?

A RAW photo is a file containing the data recorded by the camera’s image sensor before it has been turned into a finished image. Each photosite on the sensor sits beneath a red, green or blue filter and records a single brightness value; the full-colour picture is only created later, when software combines those values in a step known as demosaicing. Because nothing has yet been fixed in place, a RAW file is often compared to a film negative: it holds

The same subject photographs as a different colour depending on what is lighting it. A white wall recorded at midday, again in open shade, and again under the lights inside a house will come back as three different colours, even though you saw one wall all day. Your eyes corrected for the light without asking you; the camera did not. White balance is the control that performs that correction, and once you understand it, the same control becomes one of the more useful creative tools on the camera. This article covers what white balance is, how colour temperature works, what each preset does, and how to use both deliberately.

What is white balance?

Human vision has a property called colour constancy. A white gable wall in the Bo-Kaap reads as white at eleven in the morning and still reads as white at six in the evening, even though the light falling on it has shifted dramatically towards orange. Your visual system discounts the light source and reports the surface.

A camera does no such thing.