Blue?

...blue, blue, is my world blue?

As I look at things with my eyes, my world sports what I would consider to be normal colors. But as my camera has been viewing things over the past couple of weeks, the world wears a tint of blue. Is that because I've been playing with a new lens on my camera? But the hues in the pictures I shot last Friday were consistent - and I used two different lenses. So it's definitely not the lens.

Ah, it must be the camera. I looked for hints of what would cause a blue tint to photos, and oops! it was a camera setting that some silly photographer (yes, me!) left on my camera. The white balance setting was totally wrong. I thought maybe I had the white balance set for a sunny day and I was shooting under cover of clouds, or on a sunny day in the shade of trees. That was close, but the setting was actually worse than that. Somehow, someday, I had apparently set the white balance to custom. Now that's a really bad choice if the meaning of custom isn't also indicated to the camera - and the day I inadvertantly set white balance to custom had totally different lighting conditions than my "camera days" over the past two weeks. I rode my bike to work today so exercise after I returned home was somewhat over the top. But - I needed to verify that my guess was right, so as soon as my bike and I rolled home, I grabbed a quick snack, my camera, and my walking shoes and headed out to play.

The answer? Yes, it absolutely was my brain-cramped white balance setting that was causing the blue tint. New photos carried reality in them, and I spent the evening fixing the photos that I'd taken over the past two weeks.

The good thing about this exercise is that I think (I hope) it will be a very long time before I forget to adjust the white balance on the camera again. And yes, I am smiling; it's absolutely silly to get upset about something like this.

Many thanks to Stephen from Australia who shook me into action via a question in an email. I was already thinking my recent photos were too blue, just hadn't taken the step to figure out why. Stephen's email gave me the motivation I needed to solve the puzzle.