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Fine Tuning (+3 to -3): Color is critical. The basic settings above get you close, but
probably not exactly what you want. These fine adjustments allow you to get the exact
amount of coolness or warmth. + is cooler and - is warmer. Nikons allow you to adjust this
and remembers your preference for every setting while the Canons often skip this. Without
the ability to fine tune these settings I find the Canon Rebel, 300D and 10D cameras not
very useful. One can even fine tune Nikon's AUTO setting. Most photos on my D70 are
made in AUTO -3.
Manual, Custom or Preset (sometimes a symbol with a dot and two triangles): This allows
you to point the camera at something you want to be neutral and it makes it that way. Read
the manual to your camera for specifics. Usually the camera sets itself to what's in front of
you. Some cameras also can set themselves to something in an image shot previously.
TRICK: Set it pointed at something colored or through a colored filter and your resulting
photos will have a color cast opposite the color to which you set it! Set it on something blue
and photos come out yellow, set it on something purple and the photos come out green.
Point it at something warm and you get cool and vice versa. You even can buy specially
tinted "white" cards for this and see examples here.
You use this setting if you have some weird light that otherwise you can't get to look good. I
rarely use it, since auto does almost the same thing and makes it much easier.
MORE TIPS:
Indoor Sports
When shooting under fluorescent or mercury lighting the color of the light may actually
change hundreds of times a second as the AC power cycles. This is no problem with long
exposures. On the other hand shooting indoor sports this drove me completely insane until
I figured this out. I was shooting at ISO 3,200 and 1/500 of a second. Exposures and color
were very different from frame to frame and I had no idea why until I realized that the lights
by design were flickering 120 times a second from the 60 Hz power. There is no way
around this other than to retrofit the arena with high frequency ballasts for all the lights or
otherwise replace or overpower the arena's lighting. We use high frequency ballasts for our
HMI lights in Hollywood so we don't get beats with the 24FPS film cameras, but its
expensive and not done in stadiums. Good luck!
Flash Indoors
What setting do you use for fill flash under tungsten light? If you use AUTO or Flash you'll
get orange backgrounds and normal subjects, and this is pretty good. If you are shooting
under fluorescents you'll get a nasty green background with normal looking subjects, not
good.
If you change the white balance to tungsten or Fluorescent the backgrounds will look
normal, but now the fill light on the subject will look blue or purple. Not good.
Here's the trick from Hollywood: you need to gel (filter) the flash to match the ambient light
and then set the white balance for that ambient light. Now everything will look normal. You
could gel all the ambient light to match the flash instead, but that's a lot more work since
there's a lot more lights. In Hollywood movies we'll spend a day gelling all the different
© 2007 KenRockwell.com 49 converted by Sándor Nagy