Photography Tip: Custom White Balancing

[captbunzo]

I recently learned what I think will be the best reef aquarium photography tip ever from the first edition of Anthony Calfo's new journal.

White Balancing

When a digital camera records an image, it has to look at the world and decide exactly color everything should be. Unfortunately, the same colors can look extremely different in different light sources --- we are all familiar with light color here, Kelvin (10000K vs 15000K vs 20000K bulbs, etc).

A formal defination of white balance would be:

A way of calibrating a camera's color response to take into account different color temperatures of light (ie, fluorescent light is greenish; sunlight, more blue; incandescent light, yellowish). This calibration allows the camera to define what the color white is under any of these various lighting conditions. Failure to white balance could result in an unsightly, unnatural color cast.

So cameras will have default white balance mode such as flourescent, sunlight, incandesent, etc. And usually a camera is, by default, set in an auto white balance mode which will try to decide which of the pre-programmed white balance modes to use. This is usually pretty good for general purpose photography.

However, I have discovered that the default white balance mode for digital cameras relatively SUCKS for taking reefkeeping pics. Enter the wonder of custom white balance configuration.

In short, you take a solid white card (piece of paper, etc), hold it up in front of your lens under the light setting which you will be photographing, and tell your camera to calibrate white balancing. Your camera will do some magic and now have a better understanding for white balancing in your tank.

Now, the sad part is that I have not had a chance to test this out since I ran across this tip. However, I plan to give it a try this evening and will post my results here. I welcome/encourage others to try as well and post your results.

Do note that you'll have to figure out how (and if) your camera is able to perform custom white balance configuration. Post your camera make & model and we'll help you figure it out...

 

[Travis L. Stevens]

Yes, this trick does work. It takes a little practice to get it right, though. I've ended up with some outrageoud colors because I did it wrong, but it is a wonderful tip!