@missmercy gave me this get pushed challenge: "pick one feature that you've not used, or mastered, before and have a go at taking pictures using that setting." Well, Frank had the camera out of town Monday through Wednesday. Now that I've gotten it back, I really haven't taken too much in the way of artful photographs. But I did play with the white balance to familiarize myself with the various settings, as I have trouble understanding what is going on -- particularly indoors. The rainbow above was taken in my bathroom this morning. I arranged a few things to give me a variety of blues, purple, green, white, off-white. The day before I took some hasty pictures outdoors for the same type of experimentation. I probably won't bother to post those.
The settings on my Sony Cybershot DSC-120 are: WB Auto, daylight, cloudy/shade, white fluorescent light, natural white fluorescent light, day white fluorescent light, Incandescent, flash.
The shots seen above were taken in order starting with the first interior setting -- white fluorescent light and going through the flash WB setting but without using flash. The last two are on that same WB setting, but WITH flash, first on the normal flash setting and next changing to lower flash intensity.
The light in the room is an overhead fixture with a compact fluorescent bulb. I don't know what precise variety of bulb. There is also a window with some natural light, but it was pretty early and overcast, so that wasn't a major factor.
I can see that the incandescent setting "lowers the temperature," undoubtedly to compensate for how the incandescent bulbs are altering the indoor light. In my outdoor experimentation there were less noticeable differences until I came to the incandescent, which gave a weird blue cast over the sunny day scene.
Although I don't have much in the way of photography to offer in this instance, I am learning stuff about my camera. My default for flash setting is no flash. If I choose "flash auto" I still have the full range of WB settings. When I put it into "Flash on" or "SL - keep subject and distant backgrounds bright" the WB choices are reduced to only two -- auto or flash.
Hmm....there's still lots to learn.
