Well my darling wife just won both the Toastmasters International Area 56 (Skyway, 1st Burlington, 1st Oakville, OPS Brave Hearts, Masion clubs) Evaluation and International Speech Contests. She qualified to compete after winning both contests at our local club level. I came in second (as always) to her in the evaluation contest.
So what’s this got to do with photography?
Well rather than dragging out the big guns (D-300 and D-90 both with SB-900s and a variety of lenses) I packed the FujiFilm F-31fd. People laughed when I whipped out the tiny camera.
Nobody’s laughing now after seeing the images. Here they all are on my public Flickr site (I’ve also got a SmugMug site I use for my more commercial work.). Now why am I showing you all the images? Notice some look pretty yellowy. This is a white balance issue. In other words, the three little channel guns that feed the digital sensor (red, green and blue) are being adversely affected by the florescent lights in the room. And, because I am shooting with a point and shoot camera which can’t create a RAW file (which would allow me to fix any white balance issues in software in my computer), I had to find a way to balance the light coming into the camera. (Here’s Marion being congratulated by Diane Quigley, on right, of First Oakville Toastmasters Club.)
I think it safe to say that every digital camera of any note has the ability to change the white balance settings. They need to have this capability because JPG files (which unlike RAW files set all the parameters right in the image as it’s being shot. RAW files are much more manipulatable in the computer.) can’t be fixed later. So, I went off auto white balance (AWB) and looked for a setting where the images looked less yellow. I couldn’t find one. So I put the camera into “custom” white balance and shot an image which was saved to the camera memory and from then on, using the custom setting, I got pretty nicely colour balanced images. These images are easy to spot because they look a little bluer (or cooler to the eye) than the yellow images.
Here’s Marion with former First Oakville Presidents Matt Wagner and Katherine Ryell.
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