As I was capturing the images for my post on Bending colours to make a sunset sizzle I realised that there are a couple of flaws with this technique:
- There isn’t always a white wall around
- It takes a couple of minutes extra to do
There are always workarounds: one could carry a whitebalance card for example but that is just more stuff to carry. If time is of a premium and you’re likely to be swapping filters then time to calibrate could become a big issue.
But what if you have a library of calibration images on a CF card that you can use? I don’t know about you but I have a few smaller cards lying around that are next to useless these days. The 16MB card won’t physically hold a full size RAW image from the 5DmkII and the 64MB card might just take 3 but that’s you’re limit. So, useless for capturing images but could be pressed back into service to hold a library of WB calibration images. Then, every time the gels are changed it is simply a case of loading the card, selecting the right image and creating a custom WB setting.
Haven’t tried it yet so I don’t know if it will work. It’s just a theory but could be very useful 🙂
