snpsht:

White Balance tip via markbean (from balltillifall):

In order to get really good white balance you have to stop relying on the Auto White Balance function on your camera, you might not realize it now but it probably sucks. A quick tip:

Get something white (a coffee filter or plastic bag from Target work great).

1. Put your camera on auto mode and manual focus.
2. Stretch said white thing over your lens and take a picture.
3. Go to your menu and set manual white balance to the picture you just took.
4. Put your settings back the way you had them before and go take awesome pictures.

The above picture shows the difference between the auto white balance on my camera and the manual white balance. As you can see the auto white balance really sucks. The coffee filter trick can sometimes tend to be a little on the blue side, but this can easily be fixed in Photoshop, and even if you don’t fix it looks much better than super orange pictures.

Mareen adds: You may also photograph a subject laying in the light you are attempting to use.
The so called white balance is actually a gray balance, so a gray surface appears neutral in its current light, which is being substracted from of the picture.

I usually have my Canon camera set to 5200 K, and since I photograph in raw format, it is never a problem to change this later.

If you want, here is some further read on digital-photography-school.com and Wikipedia.