Of necessity, White depicted this cultural milieu with an extraordinary rendering of light. Due to very long hours at his accounting job, often going from 7 am to 6 pm six days a week, White most often photographed his subjects just after dawn and just before dusk. Once he wrote "My photographs were less sharp than others and I do not think it was because of the lens so much as the conditions under which the photographs were made ‒ never in the studio, always in the home or in the open, and when out of doors at a time of day very rarely selected for photography." He also shared an intimate familiarity with his subjects, who most often were his wife, her three sisters and his own children.