Monday, December 31, 2007

White Balance


I guess by now everyone else probably understands the significance of ensuring that a camera's white balance is set correctly... but I didnt. Never really had much call to play with that using my old Olympus. The new D80 has a few hoops to jump through to manually set the white balance, but once that's done, WATCH OUT! Talk about sharp color.

Next step: shooting under the lightbox with tungsten bulbs tomorrow evening.

The upper image was shot in the gallery tonight, totally black outside (snowing even!), so the lighting was a mix of halogen and incandescent. The second image is filtered using a mix of settings in Nik Color Effects. The lower two images were shot outside in the morning. My hope was to compare these shots to ones I took earlier this fall with the Olympus. From what I can see so far, the older camera had a better "super" macro setting. Also has an LCD which tilts so you can shoot from the hip or over your head. Going "back" to shooting through a viewfinder is kind of awkward. Almost makes me wish we had bought the D300, but then again, spending $1900 on just the camera body was out of the question. As it is, we spent another $200 on the camera tonight, buying accessories and filters. Fun fun fun.

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