how do you swt white balance?

How do you set your white balance?

Is a white balance card held with one hand in front of my lens the best method? Is that to close?

If you are asking about setting up a "custom white balance", there are two things you must be sure of. One is that the card is held in light that is identical to that which is illuminating the subject. Also, you need to have enough of the frame filled to do the task properly. Read your camera's manual for the details.

I almost never use "custom white balance", as I find doing the setup to be a pain.

I shoot in RAW and normally merely set the camera's white balance selector to whatever I determine the light source to be. When color balance is critical for the job (when others would use "custom white balance"), I often place a reference card into the scene for a test shot. When doing RAW conversion, it's easy to use an "eyedropper tool" to sample the reference card in the test shot and then transfer the color temperature and tint numbers to the rest of the images in the series.

That would get my vote as well Skip. It is so easy to change it in RAW, that it is almost silly not too.

Also worth remembering is that the "correct" WB might not be right one for the scene. I often change the WB to suit the subject rather than the scene (maybe from daylight to cloudy or so on) as this can actually improve the "feel" of the image by warming or cooling it.

Try taking a landscape sometime in RAW and try using different WB settings, you will get a different feel from each.

Here's the best one I've seen so far that teaches you how to do a white balance on a Canon or Nikon..

http://kelbytv.com …tv/2010/02/05/e​pisode-28/

I sort of agree, but "almost" is a key word. Curtis N found that a blown red channel is a problem:
How NOT to expose to the right
I've seen that problem when I forgot to at least set a CB pre-set, & I'm not convinced that I can bring everything back into balance with RAW processing.

At the very least, I do that, too. And FWIW, some people swear that AWB is OK outdoors. I'm not one of them, & be aware that AWB really sucks under artificial light. I ran a test indoors & have never used it since. Notice that the very last exposure in the 2nd image of tests was of a gray card, & it's way off.
https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=54281

Good idea.

If you're using it to set a CWB, then there's no reason why it should be in focus. If you mean the card with the black/gray/white squares to adjust in PP, then I think it should be.

Gray Card…White Paper. What’s best?