White Unbalanced

The term 'white balance' should be familiar to all video/photographers. To adjust the white balance, what people usually do is to chuck any spanking white object (usually a piece of paper) in front of the lens, and use your finger to jam the white balance button. Pretty straightforward.

This afternoon, after I left Jy and Henry at Bugis Junction, I decided against heading down to Bugis Village and went for the library instead. The book that I laid my eyes upon is a "cookbook" of camera tricks for low budget film makers, without the need for those ridiculously overpriced equipment. And zOmg, why didn't I think of this before!? One of the tricks was that instead of using something plain white to adjust the white balance, you can play around with the lighting effects by using other coloured cardboards to tune your white balance. So throw in a blue cardboard and the footages will have a slight orange flavour. (Of course there is the option of using colour correction, but thats besides the point now. xD) And presto, a scene that is originally brightly lit now has a golden glow, misleading the viewers that the sun should be setting, while in fact the shot was taken in afternoon conditions.

So simple, and yet so brilliant.