AWB – the Whites and Wrongs
What do we mean by white? It turns out this is a confusing question, and one which depends on
who’s looking, and where. In the second part of Photography for Writers, Ronald Turnbull’s search
for the white answer takes him to early days in the Alps, and right back to Everest in 1924...
S
Film fun
We aren’t usually so aware of it –
but this happens all the time. The
eye and the brain have all kinds
of clever software: software that
organises and makes sense of the
incoming data before presenting it
to human awareness. To illustrate
the paragraph above, I went into
my old photos and pulled out
George Mallory’s goggles, as found
in the trouser pocket of his corpse
on the North ridge of Everest in
1999 and then placed on display
at Rheged on the A66. Did I look
at those goggles and go: oh my
gosh the nasty blizzard at 8000m
has faded them to bright luminous
orange? Well, no. The Rheged
Centre had lit up the goggles
in a creepy crepuscular glow,
appropriate to souvenirs stolen
from long dead frozen corpses.
My Fuji Sensia slide fi lm I used
8 Outdoor focus | spring 2019
Morteratsch Glacier, Switzerland - after putting on goggles (left) and an hour or two later... (right)
back then did a good job of lovely
sunlit mountains scenes. Using the
same chemical pigments, it has
rendered the shades of Rheged
as a sort of dingy orange. But my
real-life eye, up in the erstwhile
Mountain Museum, had already
discounted the tasteful lighting.
What I actually saw corresponded
with the photo on the right.
The Fuji Sensia records the
colours that it thinks the objects
actually are, on the assumption
that they’re being illuminated
by some sunlight. And it did that
rather well, given that all it had to
record with was various sorts of
light-sensitive salts. But when the
thing’s illuminated by something
that isn’t the sun, the Fujifi lm
records the orange or bluish tints
– tints that the human eye would
already have fi ltered back out
before letting the brain two inches
further back actually behold it.
Digital magic
Digital cameras do better. Rather
than opening up the back of
the camera and switching to a
diff erent sort of fi lm, you just
press a button – the White Balance
button. Or else you click down a
menu, the White Balance menu.
This will give you choices of
Daylight, Cloudy, and Shade. It
Looted grave goods: George Mallory’s goggles at Rheged (right) as seen by RT’s human eye (left) as
recorded by the Fuji camera fi lm (right) after white balance adjustment
lopes of the Rimpfi schhorn
above the Zermatt valley,
some time in the twentieth
century. We step onto the glacier,
stop to rope up, and my father
hands me a pair of glacier glasses.
They’re beautifully crafted in
chamois leather, with aluminium
rims, a strap that tightens, and
eyepieces made of orange tinted
glass. They are, as it happens, the
same basic pattern that the chaps
were wearing on Everest.
I put on the goggles of orange
glass, and the glacier and the
snowfi elds all suddenly look bright
orange. (Well they do until the
goggles immediately mist up.) But
that’s not the surprising bit. The
surprising bit is what happens an
hour or two later. I’m still looking
at the snowfi elds through the
orange goggles; but the snowfi elds
appear ordinary snowfi eld-like
white.