How white are your whites?One the biggest challenges of photography is understanding just good the Mark I eyeball is at dealing with light. The human eye is capable to dealing with light at a level well beyond any camera in existence, particularly with dynamic range and colour temperature, or white balance.
Colour temperature makes a fire look orange and a florescent light green, but the human eye can render it all in the correct colour while the camera cannot. Hence the strange and interesting colours when shooting under artificial light, or even just a cloudy day.
Most cameras, even simple point and shoots, have an option to set colour temperature (cloudy, sunny, indoors, night, etc) or more exact setting on professional cameras. If you shoot raw, like I do, you can set the colour temperature after the fact or even change it at will. Unfortunately, the all have the same problem, even with photoshop. Unless you have a white object in the picture, how can you define "white" (or grey or black) - you need a reference. Usually, this results in best guesstimates and less than perfect results.
One solution is to set a custom white balance using a special filter or card. The filters work well, but setting the custom white balance is rather time consuming and needs to be done again whenever the light changes. This works well in a studio, but usually fails in the field, particularly with changing light.
One solution is to have a standard target, in either colour or black&white, for reference. You've probably seen the square filled with little patches of colour from vendors like Getag-MacBeth. They work great, but don't travel well, as they about the size of a sheet of paper and somewhat fragile. Once more, a great studio solution that doesn't work well in the field.
My favorite tool for setting white balance in the field is the WhiBal kit. It's made from very durable plastic, and coloured to include a black, grey, and white area. It's also been tested with a spectrophotometer to make sure each patch is accurate in colour. You simply take a picture of the card in your hand under the lighting conditions and you have a solid reference for white, grey, and black.
The previous version used three different cards that you fanned out to have a sample of each. Each card was a little bigger than a business card, so you could carry it around, but the fanning out was a bit of a pain while event shooting. This has now been reduced to a single card, with a carrying case and neck strap. This makes it easy to carry and access, even during a fast moving shoots, such as events.
The current version, which is the 6th version, is now a single grey card with a black and white sticker. The pocket kit is 2"x3.5", has its own carrying case and neck strap and is very easy to simply keep in the camera bag. The studio kit is 3.5"x6" and the reference kit is 8.5"x11". It's handy to pull out on a shoot whenever the light seems to have change and take a reference shot. The black card lets you use it as a stand for hands free shooting
I recently used mine for a natural light night shoot of a few boats under a bridge. The light was provided by sodium street lights, florescent, and moonlight with snow behind me to reflect everything together. My Whibal reference made my post production very simple.
This is so useful and so important, I'm considering getting a second one for the camera bag as a backup.
You can find this and other useful tools at
www.rawworkflow.comDirect link:
http://www.rawworkflow.com/products/whibal/index.htmlLabels: equipment, gear, light, technical, useful
