Environmental Portraiture: Tell Your Subject’s Story and Create Dynamic Portraits with One Bag of Gear

Color correcting for bad light

In many situations in which you are adding light, you will need to perform color correction to keep skin tones accurate. Fluorescent lights are often daylight balanced, but in the cases where they aren’t, I use my fluorescent white-balance setting and add a PlusGreen gel to my flash. I do the same for incandescent lights, which have an orange cast. I will set my camera to the incandescent white-balance setting and add a CTO (color temperature orange) gel to my flash.

Custom white balance is an option also. In situations where there is mixed lighting, fluorescent, incandescent, and/or daylight (which exists in many offices), you can get accurate skin tones by having your camera read a white card. In an effort to ...