White balance

I recently blogged about white balance and left little explanation. Hence, here's a low-tech quickie primer on white balance for DSLR (and possibly point-n-shoot) photography (also applicable to video cameras as well).

Every shooting situation requires your camera adjust to the color of the light that is being used for making the exposure.

You've no doubt seen different color casts on your images when shooting in certain situations. This used to be more prevalent when shooting film but now, digital cameras are much more adept at handling the situation with some exceptions.

However, for people wanting to take the next step up in controlling their images you need to consider "telling" your camera what color or temperature of light you're shooting with.

Instead of using the "auto" white balance, you can choose to select a variety of situational settings like "cloudy," "daylight," "incandescent," "fluorescent," and "open shade" amongst others.

These are handy for quick calculations and when you're shooting on the fly.

But to get really serious, you need to purchase a white balance tool such as a diffusion screen or white/gray/black card or some such.

I prefer a white/gray/black card. It works very well for me. You need to check your camera's manual for instructions on how to exactly do the procedure. Essentially you hold the white/gray/black portion of the card directly in the light you are shooting in and take a closeup photo of the white portion while in the white balance mode as directed by your camera manufacturer.

This sets the camera's white balance for that particular setting. If the light changes, you simply redo the procedure and adjust for the changing conditions.

It's a hassle and it's easy to just pick a preset white balance, but I've found many of the presets are not very accurate because they cannot account for all kinds of situations. They are just averages.

This is just a quickie to get you started exploring white balance. I will add more later about including the white/gray/black card in your photos to further help with white balance.

4x5 Yea!!!

I'm back up and running with the Cambo. Props go to Jason Heitsman for selling me the camera a few years ago. I don't get to use it as much as I like, but when I do, it's a ball.

I'm sad I can't get Polaroid 55 anymore. That really weakens my arsenal.

This is Stephanie. She's model living here in Gastonia. I love her versatility. She can do fashion, punk, art nudes and anything in between and make it look easy.

I like my 4x5 images to be kind of grungy and less than ideal. This one may be a little oversharpened, but I still like it.

The image is from a series I made comparing different photographic formats. I shot a range of images using everything from a 4 mp point and shoot up to my 4x5. I particularly like this image. I love lots of tilt shift and getting close to my models' eyes.

This is one of my last sheets of Kodak TMax 100. I'm going to be switching over to some Ilford HP5 Plus 400 for a while.

For the techies out there, I'm planning on rating the Ilford at ISO 200 so I can pull process the film and hopefully create some better shadow detail and control the highlights a little better. This is what I call a poor man's Zone System. The negs should scan a lot better using this tonal range anyway.

I'll keep you guys posted.

Getting lazy with white balance

One of the most dangerous things about digital photography is that it makes the photographer a lazy technician. The ease of fixing things in post production becomes an alluring path when you're out shooting.

I recently photographed my daughter's first softball game. OK, it was a scrimmage. But she dressed in her uniform and they played in game conditions, so I consider it her first "game".

Anyway, I dragged out the big lenses and really just shot for fun, but I ended up shooting a gallery of images of her and her teammates. The problem was that I shot much of the action using the "auto" white balance. Naturally as I framed images, the color balance changed slightly throughout the range of images as the camera "saw" different backgrounds and foregrounds. Additionally I could see color shifts as the daylight changed temperatures.

So when I got home and starting editing the images for a web gallery, I spent way too much time correcting for all the variations in color. And, of course, I can't get very consistent color across the spectrum of images on my own.

If I was going to be really diligent I would have whipped out my handy white-balance card and performed the manual white balance every 30 minutes or so. At that time of the day, even overcast light changes temperature fairly quickly. Even as I changed from the auto white balance to the "cloudy" white balance I saw changes in the consistency of the color balance.

So, I can't say the lesson is learned, because I knew the lesson already. It's just a matter of not getting lazy. It's probably OK if you're just looking for two or three images for the family album. But when you start putting tens or hundreds of pictures out there for people to consume, then things become a bit more serious.