Tool or Toy?

Ok... I will warn you now (Sandy), this fall into the tech-geek area but it is kind of a really cool little item. Whit balance has been an issue in photography as long as the camera itself. This is where the overall color of the product is just no the same as the color of the event when you took the shot.

Whit balance really has to do with how the overall light temperature has to do with the interaction of the film or photo sensor. Wow did I just say light temperature... Yep, sure did. If you have been around a camera for very long you have most likely heard of the temperature of light.

I am going to take a pass on getting into chromaticity, black box radiators, and Planck's Law. Ok... I gotta get into that just a bit cause it sounds so cool...  Planck's law describes the spectral radiance of electromagnetic radiation at all wavelengths from a black body at a given temperature. Wasn't that way cool! Suffice it to say the temperature of light or color temperature is simply quantifying the characteristics of light. That quantitative value being measured in degrees kelvin.

So there your are in an effort to get the perfect capture, you have ventured out of the automatic modes and even got into a wight balance menu and have the camera off of the AWB or auto white balance setting. You are all set to go. You look at the LCD after the first shot and is sucks, so you flip back over to everything automatic and you are off to the races with very little flexibility. I say NO! Man-up, grow a couple or however you want to put it but don't wimp out and withdraw back into AUTO (That is a four letter word you know).

Experiment... Actually get your camera manual out and see what all these buttons do. You will be surprised. So back to the purpose of this post.

There are three ways to handle white balance. Auto, Selective White Balance, Custom White Balance, and post production correction. If you get the drift of this post there are only three there! Using the in camera's selection of White Balance generally give pretty good options such as Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, and Flash. In most post production software now, even a jpg file can be adjusted for white balance. This used to be left to the RAW file people only. Having said that, RAW generally provided all the camera white balance options as preset where as jpg may have to be manually adjusted. Finally there is custom white balance.

Ok... So what is so good about custom white balance. It is just one more thing to have to set up before you take your shots. This is true, but once set up for the lighting conditions, every shot is at the correct color temperature. Some might use an 18% grey card to take a shot of then set in the cameras Custom White Balance menu and there are other devices. One that I use is called the ExpoDisc from the folks at ExpoImaging.

What you see above is an example of the ExpoDisc. The basic design is to have a perfectly opaque and balanced image for the camera to view a light sample through as it looks towards the light. It come is a white balanced version as well as a warmer portrait version. Sizes run the gamut but I have a 77mm as all you have to do is hold it up against a smaller lens and it does the same thing.

As you can see from the images above, an incorrectly set white balance vs the auto white balance established with the ExpoDisc.

Now do I use this device religiously? No. I do try when I know that the color of the light is not going to change. Shooting in RAW as stated above give me a little more flexibility than in jpg but I would rather get it right in the camera and not have to fuss with it in post.

Hey that's enough for a Monday. Cya... Doug