AboutJohn and Chris Expertise We are both professional photographers, with over 15 years experience. We can answer questions about photography, as well as questions about cameras from the 60s to 90s. (extensive 35mm, quite a bit of other formats.) Please, no darkroom questions.
Expert: John and Chris Date: 4/28/2007 Subject: white balance
Question Hi - I have a DSLR: Canon Rebel XT. My question regards white balance. I have a number of insect eggs and plan on getting photos of them while they are hatching. Their egg cases were laid on a fence post right outside my window. The fence post is brown, the egg cases are brown and so are the insects when they first come out. I am taking a hot pink poster board and putting it in back of the fence post where they hatch so that I can easily use photo shop to erase all the pink and then paste in a more attractive backround. The problem is that nothing in the photo is white at all or gray. I have a plan and would like to know if it would work to achieve an effective white balance - I plan to put an %18 grey card on the poster board in the backround - could I do that and just set the camera's white balance to automatic and acheive a good white balance since the grey card will be in there? OR Do I have to custom set the whole thing with a grey card each time I take a photo (since the eggs hatch at differnt times and in different lightings). Thankyou for your advice - any way you could help me would be appreciated...........Pete
Answer If the pink card takes up a majority of the image, then an auto white balance would probably fail. A custom white balance would be much more reliable but of course inconvenient. If your images are going to be made in daylight, you would probably get good results by simply setting the "daylight" preset white balance. Another alternative would be to shoot in RAW (canon CRW) and set the WB with the Canon (or photoshop if you have it) RAW converter after you get to the computer.
