Another reason to love digital photography

[beige_alert]

Yet another reason to love digital photography:





It snowed today. Before shoveling, I got a few photographs. The light is from high-pressure sodium street lamps. I set a custom white balance using the snow as a white sample, and, look, the color is fairly natural. The snow is white, my red car is red. I’m used to losing two stops to a deep blue filter to shoot color slide film indoors under tungsten light, and you can just forget any other kind of artificial light other than the flash, and now I can get decent photos under fluorescent lights, or as this shows, even high pressure sodium.

Comments

Film is so dead

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

The auto white balance on the Digital Rebel is so good I haven't felt any motivation to learn how to use the custom settings. And people who rate more expensive cameras say that they are even better.

Re: Film is so dead

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

The auto white on the A95 is fine with sunlight and will get you in the right general region with artificial light, but for best results with artificial light it really needs either to be set manually (to incandescent or one of the fluorescent settings, as appropriate), or better yet aimed at something neutral for a custom adjustment.

It is great to be able to set it to ISO 400 sensitivity and an appropriate white balance setting and shoot hand-held indoors without a flash if the light is good, even with the somewhat slow lens, f/2.8 at the wide end. You certainly can't do that with 100 speed slide film and two stops lost to the deep blue filter. I think I bought a roll of tungsten-balanced slide film once, but then you can't use sunlight or flash. The digital white balance reminds me of black and white, where you can pretty much ignore color temperature and use any light, which is quite liberating.