This ratio suits some subjects perfectly, and it’s been used for this picture of a town in Northern Italy. However, as yet ‘widescreen’ photo papers aren’t widely available, so if you want a widescreen print you’ll probably have to cut a larger sheet down to size.

Digital SLR owners, though, can go a step further with ‘super-wideangle’ lenses. This is a broad definition, but it’s generally taken to mean anything wider than 24mm equivalent. This picture, taken inside Wells Cathedral, was shot using a 14mm lens, which is about the widest lens available unless you resort to a fisheye design.

Wideangle and super-wideangle lenses are extremely useful for dramatic perspective effects, panoramic landscape shots, architecture and interiors. Many photographers choose a telephoto as their ‘second’ lens soon after they buy a digital SLR, but a super-wideangle lens would probably give them more scope.

Auto white balance
Digital cameras offer an ‘auto white balance’ mode, various preset settings to match specific conditions and a manual mode where you can measure and set the white balance yourself.

Auto white balance is the default setting, but it’s not always successful. Typically, the camera will fail to correct enough in unusual conditions. It’s rare, for example, for a camera to compensate fully for the yellow-orange tone of domestic tungsten lighting. For this reason, photographers often prefer to choose white balance ‘presets’. Cameras offer several of these, typically ‘daylight’, ‘cloudy’, ‘tungsten’, and ‘fluorescent’. Some professional cameras also offer ‘colour temperature’ settings (a more technical approach to white balance measurement). The examples above show the difference – the one on the left was taken with auto white balance, which hasn’t provided enough correction for the artificial lighting, while the one on the right was taken with the ‘tungsten’ white balance preset, which has produced a much better result.

The one time when auto white balance can be really useful is when you’ve got mixed light sources, for example daylight and artificial light, where there’s no one correct setting anyway. Here, the camera’s attempt to find a balance somewhere in the middle is often better than choosing any one white balance preset. The picture above is a good example.
Manual white balance

Most digital cameras also offer a manual or ‘custom’ white balance setting. Here, you aim the camera at a white or neutral-toned object like a sheet of white paper, for example, and the camera measures the colour of the paper in the current lighting to work out a correction, or manual setting. That was the technique used for the picture above, where it was important that the paper should come out a clean, neutral white.

Daylight white balance
Sometimes, though, the colours in the picture don’t need correcting. In fact, sometimes they are the whole point of the picture, and this is often overlooked by both camera makers and photographers. Here, it’s important to override the auto white balance setting to prevent it from trying to fix what doesn’t need fixing.

The pictures above are good examples. Theyr’e taken from the same hotel but at two different times of day. the picture on the left was taken at dawn when the light had a strong pink hue, while the one on the right was taken in the evening and has a steely-blue hue from the overcast sky. In both cases, the colour of the light was part of the picture and needed to be preserved intact.

For outdoor photography where the colour of the light is an integral part of the photo (that’s landscape photography in general, then!), try setting the camera’s white balance to ‘daylight’. This is closest to a standard, neutral colour rendition and hence the colour of the light will be reproduced faithfully, as you see it.