Whiteout or Wipeout?

I often wonder what other people did about white balance when they used film in their cameras. I know some people who shot in studios bought odd emulsions that were biased to tungsten lights - and they had to be careful to get the particular film for their lights, or vice versa.

Others sat there with colour temperature meters and measured what was coming out of the lights, or in trough the window, then did a page and a half of mathematics, and then shuffled through the accessories box to see if there are some filters for the lens or some gels for the lights or a big sheet of cellophane for the window. And then shot it with fingers crossed.

Nowadays we have the wonderful facility of the white balance control on the camera. Generally accessed through the menu, it allows a vast range of presets for daylight, flash, tungsten light, and a number of other atmospheric conditions. Frequently there is an "Auto" setting and if you have a good camera a custom setting that lets you measure what is out there and act accordingly.

Have a look at the "Auto" setting on my little studio camera. Not coping very well at all in the first instance, but spot-on in the second. What did I do that made the difference?I used an expodisc, that's what.

The Expodisc is a light integrator that gathers colour from many angles and presents it to the measuring program in the camera as a pure blank - and then you ask the camera computer to regard this as the standard to which you wish to work. It works - see the second view of the studio desk.

I can see this as the ideal solution for the wedding photographer who gets caught in a church with off-white walls and off-colour windows. The light inside one of these edifices may be conducive to holiness, but I'll guarantee when you see it later on your computer screen as a raw image you won't be reciting blessings...not if you have to sit there and manually re-balance an entire shoot.

Simply slip the appropriate size Expodisc on the front of the lens you'll be working with and take a WB shot in the same light as that falling on the bride. Your camera will do the rest and your post processing will be ever so much simpler.

Even in studio flash circumstances, the output from your strobes might be 5500º Kelvin which matches your camera preset, or it might be different, depending upon the age of the tubes. The Expodisc can set you exactly onto studio white.

They are available now in our shop in various sizes from 62mm on up. Highly recommended.

Welcome To The Expodisc Lab...

In the same fine scientific spirit that inspires the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory ( ie. light the fuse and run like hell...) I decided to test out three of the products that we sell here at the shop - working in conjunction with each other. Those of you with a technical bent may find that this is technically...bent. But read on.

I have a very mixed lighting situation here at the Editorial Centre ( the old storeman's desk ). There are two fluorescent lights above the desk with three disparate tubes.  One is yellow, one is pink, and one is green. I feel like a tray of mince set out in the butchers. At the end of the day. Cheap.

My Fuji X-10 has a number of ways to set the white balance. Auto, custom, fluorescent 1, 2, and 3. I decided to see if they worked and to add the further factor of an Expodisc to see if it did as it claimed.
The target was a sort of cheap Macbeth card that we had in the cabinet downstairs - not a real X-rite card, just a substitute.

Here are the results - in case the hand-written notes don't show, they are auto, custom, flourescent 2 and 3, and Expodisc.

My conclusion is that the Expodisc does as good as a custom white balance off a pure white card. Of course this IS a custom white balance, but done through a scrambling filter and done very conveniently whenever you change your lighting setup.

 It isn't available in a small enough size to be really useful for the X-10 but it is readily adapted to the lenses on my DSLR. I should think it would be a real boon to those people who shoot all natural light in changing conditions - particularly if they do not have the comfort of RAW files to fall back upon.

The heading image? Chelsea Bunz of course.