RTFM. Give me a break! I've been using my e-1 for a little over a year and
a half now and have been having an absolute blast with it. Some wonderful
images have been created and it is now my camera of choice, although I still
burn a fair amount of film. I'm currently taking a continuing education class
at Rice University on lighting. The instructor, who some out there in
Zuikoland may have run into in Colorado, California or perhaps New York, is a
fellow by the name of Don Eddy. In addition to having a strong education in
photography, Don is also a good photographer. Being 6 or 7 years older than
me,
it would probably not surprise many if I told you that Don is basically an
analog capture kind of guy. He does have a point and shoot digital, scans his
film, uses a computer to process his scans and has a printer from which he can
make huge prints. That being said, he started his education in the 50's
when many digital photographers had not yet drawn their first breath.
The text we are using is "Photographic Lighting" by Ralph Hattersley which
is out of print and was first published in 1979. If anyone becomes tempted to
buy it, don't buy the first printing as some of the images are reversed. Most
of the 20 or so students in his class are using digital for the project we
are doing. It involves lighting and photographing a white cube and a black
cube. This is actually a pretty interesting exercise. During our second
class, which occurred this past Monday, we were using a spot meter to meter
the
light on the first cube setup. During this discussion, Don was talking about
setting your digital camera to the proper white balance for the lighting we
had rather than using Auto WB. The lighting was predominantly tungsten with a
bit of florescent. Being an Auto WB kind of guy I figured the meter/camera
would know and set it at the proper WB. For me it was one of those Thermos
kind
of deals. I don't know how it does it, but a Thermos knows to keep the hot
stuff hot and the cold stuff cold. I figured my e-1 probably had some of
that Thermos technology built into the WB function.
After setting up the shot, Don, had each of us come shoot it with our
cameras. I did it using Auto WB . . . and then repeated it having set the WB
to
Tungsten. The results were incredible. In this case Auto WB wasn't, IMHO,
even close. The cube we were photographing was white and the results I got
with
the tungsten WB setting was white as opposed to the Auto WB one which more
yellowish orange.
As I said in the subject line of this message . . .
Now where did I put that manual. For those out there who are only using
Auto WB, you might do as this old dog did and try a new trick. You may be
pleased with the results. Bill Barber
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