Repainting The Shirley - Or Why You Need A Spyder Checkr 24

We're very lucky down here at 230 Stirling Street - someone built us a test target across the street years ago and we have been using it to compare and contrast cameras, lenses, and filters ever since.

It has a broad face of different coloured panels and thin lines placed both in the center and at the margins - you can determine resolution, distortion, and chromatic aberration easily. It is front-lit in the morning and back-lit in the afternoon.

Sometimes there are human figures displayed to enable you to check portrait bokeh - and occasionally a drunk starts kicking in the phone box in front of it so you can practise your street photography skills as well...

Well, we are going to have to recalibrate it - as you can see the painters are in and there may be changes to the reflectance and chroma of the surfaces. This may take some time, and in the interim we may have to resort to that Datacolor Spyder Checkr 24 targets to do the same thing.

Actually, the Checker 24 is a good thing to take everywhere you go when you shoot. Pop it into the lighting that you are going to use and snap a shot at the start of your photography. Then when you are done, snap another. At home, when you are looking at the files you can tell whether the lighting changed and whether you are going to have to make changes to the balance of the files somewhere in the middle.

The Checkr 24 is small enough that you can dump it into any camera bag - if it saves having a client howl that you did not get the red right, it is a lifesaver.

PS: Aren't the portable cherry-pickers a great idea for painters? I want one of the ones on crawler tracks and I don't even like to do painting!