Thursday, August 28, 2008

The WB.

No, not the network. ;) WB = White Balance. I've talked about it before, and I play around with it a lot. I don't know why, but I find it really interesting. Here's a series of pics I took the other day for my knitblog. I took them in what I now know is called open shade (thanks Miz Boo!) in the morning, when it was good and bright outside. I used three different WB settings: Shade, Sun, and Auto. In that order, here they are:

WB Settings Investigation
Shade

WB Settings Investigation
Sun

WB Settings Investigation
Auto

The Shade is awful. Sun and Auto are much better, and pretty similar. Sun is actually probably closer to real life, on my monitor at least, but I prefer the slightly cooler colors of Auto. (This is probably because I have an affinity for cooler colors in general.) I ended up using a different pic, but still with the Auto WB setting. I've noticed before that Shade (and Cloud) generally give worse results than Auto, and even Sun. I kind of wrote that off to the fact that, on the scale of DSLRs, my camera (the D40) is the cheapest. But now I read Miz Boo's excellent post over at Ree's, and she says:
Personally, on my camera I do not care for the shade and cloudy options. I think their effects are too strong on my D80. So I almost always shoot on “A” for Automatic white balance. (Except when I’m inside, and then the incandescent and florescent options work wonders.)
Exactly! I would write the exact same thing! And she has a way fancier camera. I wonder if the same holds true for the super-duper fancy cameras like Ree's D200, or even the D300. Is it a Nikon thing? Canon users, what's your experience?

Sidenote: When I was at the airshow, I saw a woman using a D300 to take nothing but snapshots of her kids. My assumption is that she's a professional photographer, so she's got the nice equipment, and is most comfortable with it, so prefers it for snapshots, too. Because I cannot fathom spending $2000 on a camera for snapshots! That would be nice!

And on that note, I'm out. Work to do, dinner to eat, etc. (Hurricane already prepared for - check!) Ciao! =)

2 comments:

  1. Great examples! I like the bluer one too. :o)
    But with faces, I need to be careful and add a little orange/yellow to it in photoshop.


    I see on The Twitter that you are evacuating. That is scary and bad.

    Be safe. Come back with good stories...and pictures.

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  2. Thanks! And that's a really good point about faces. =)

    And not to worry, I'm in Baton Rouge, not NOLA, so at this point I'm not going anywhere. Well, possibly to campus to work in my office and/or volunteer with the evacuees, but I can bike there. No way I'm driving anywhere because so many of the displaced folks have come here, and the normally bad traffic is now horrendous! Hopefully there won't be any severe damage, and everyone can go home safely in a few days.

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