savvo

Does the white balance setting on your DSLR (or mine) have an effect on the camera’s exposure? Conventional wisdom says that the camera white balance can be fixed in post-processing without detriment to image quality. Yet some people suggest that this is not so; that the camera must necesarily use the WB setting to determine its exposure and so, if the WB setting is ‘wrong’ it cannot be fixed in post-process without adversely affecting exposure.

That sounded like a reasonable supposition to me, despite its main proponent being one of the emptiest vessels on usenet. After all, as we all know, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

So in the best spirit of enquiry I decided to test it out. Here are seven shots I took in aperture-priority at ISO100 on a D200 with white balance set to 2600K, 2950K, 3800K, 5000K, 6150K, 7350K and 8700K

I opened all of these into Adobe Camera Raw and adjusted them to 5500K

Can you see a difference. I certainly can’t. But that’s hardly a rigorous test.

So here are the screengrabs of ACR processing all seven files.

I can think of nothing else to say about this. I’m not going to worry about white-balance any more … set it to auto, as I always have, and forget about it. If it’s critical, stick the Lastolite Ezybalance in and fix it in post-process.

Tyne rebirth ‘is down to Mrs T’

So now we know who to blame. If only we could get some forensics to link her to the string of mysterious blazes in heritage-listed buildings.

Blogged with Flock

I quite like the new waygood website, so I nicked their layout. For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to write some inviting copy to add to it.

I can’t help but feel that everything I come up with is just a little tragic,

needy even.

Photography at the Baltic.

Stop! Stop, will you?! Stop that! Stop it! Now, look! No one is to stone anyone until I blow this whistle!

Do you understand?

Even … and I want to make this absolutely clear … even if they do say ‘Ceauşescu’.

Blogged with Flock

It’s a long-term project of mine to get a time-lapse shot of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge opening / closing at dusk. I saw that today it was opening at 1830 which, with sunset half-an-hour earlier might just be the right time. Little did I know….

Got down there just as the sun was setting and, despite the on-off rain and heavy clouds all afternoon, conditions were perfect. Previously I’ve tried this from the Newcastle side but thought I’d go south this time and planted myself by Baltic. Got the tripod lashed to the railings and the camera secured as well as possible in the gusty wind although I had to hang it out at full extension to try to minimize the railings impact on the shot.

Having set up, I began to be aware of some aural activity behind me and noticed a hefty PA set up on the Baltic terrace behind me — it was emitting a rather unpleasant, but ignorably low-level white noise and burbling. But the volume was gradually increasing.

Then suddenly, at about 1828, the volume was ramped to ear-splitting and I began to suspect, since the bridge was being cleared and there was no shipping activity, that I was unwittingly subject to a post-modern son-et-lumiere concept.

Yes indeed it was so. This would seem to have been something to with that AV festival thing. Glad I didn’t know that beforehand or I would have been sorely tempted to skip this and wait for the next opportune opening. Anyway, as with most Baltic events, the crowds stayed away in droves and conditions were perfect. So I’ve got some photoshopping to do.

But next time I’ll go back to the Newcastle side because there’s just too much railing and no way to avoid it in Gateshead.

Blogged with Flock

While I wait for the three cardsworth of photos I’ve shot today to copy to disc, I’d just like to say a big ‘thankyou’ to Manure and Chelsea for doing the decent thing and falling on their swords today. Now we’ll all be spared a repeat of that tedious final last year where they displayed their ibvious disdain for the competition for 100 minutes before Chelsea thought it might be amusing to try to score a goal.

Well done, now bugger off out of the English League and go and play in your Super League.

So there we were, minding our own business when, blammo, all of a suddenly on Feb 21 thirty people wandered in all together….

Further to that, the single most-used (non-google spider) browser visiting last month was
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/523.12 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.12
There can’t be many non-Mac-specific sites that could claim that. Seems I had a sudden rush of fashion victims. I wonder where it all came from?

At last! Somebody realises the tough job our modern police have to do and is providing them the tools to work with.

The Golden Compass, coming to a cinema near you for the festive season, is (horrors!) based on an atheist screed. And children might see it.

Well boo hoo. You can’t have this both ways you fundie hypocrites.

Here’s someone with a question

In the good old days, one would go to the bookshelf/library and get a dose of definitive advice. The really motivated could take a college course and have this kind of stuff drilled in by repetiton and practice.

What do we have today. The overwhelming tide of web2 opinion. Informed or uninformed it’s bound to be contradictory and backed up by absolutely nothing.

I considered injecting some factual context to back up those that have waved at the truth in that ‘thread.’ But really? What is the point?