Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I just got an upgraded white balance card in the mail and thought I would illustrate it's usefulness...

Excuse the dirty newspaper by the way, I was opening her cage to clean it when I noticed she was balled up... wanted to snap some shots while I had the chance.

Okay, so whats a white balance card?

Its a uh, card, that is placed in one of the pictures to later get a reading from to calibrate the white balance in perfect tune with the lighting. The card I just got is rediculously overpriced for what it is (costs them probably two bucks to make) ... but they hand test each one with some high end calibration machine so I know its accurate.

This is the first time I have really put the card to the test in a low light situation... where white balance really tends to mess up. The end result are the most accurate low light pictures ive ever taken. Im certainly pleased.

Oh and the boa aint bad either, eh? She's 5.5ft and feeding on extra large rats.

The first pic is the camera's auto white balance .. I did not calibrate it to the card in the picture. All the other shots are calibrated... they are far more accurate to what I see in person.

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Take Care,

-Ryan Homsey

www.topnotchboas.com

ttttoo much time on my hands! LOL, just giving you a hard time Ryan. The pics look great, just not sure how you get results holding that card in the pic like that. Of course you've seen my pics, so obviously I wouldn't get it-lol! Take care

Paul

I'll just copy/paste the response, lol:

In post processing.

Digitally speaking, taking the picture is just half the battle . These shots were taken in very low light so I had to use ISO 1200 to get the exposure up enough... so I ran all the pictures through neat image (to eliminate noise) ... They were then cropped/resized/sharpened, sharpened because I am shooting RAW, which allows the picture to be sharpened in post processing as a pose to in camera... which is a high quality sharpening. Also resizing dulls, sharpening brings that crispness back to the picture.

Shooting RAW (digital equivalent to a film negative) allows the white balance to be totally controled in post processing without altering the pictures color scheme in any way (not possible with JPG, you can get close but not this close). So to calibrate the shots to the card I just load the picture into my post processing program (Nikon Capture) and use my cursur to pick a grey spot on the card, which is nuetral grey... and it balances the picture to that.

Doing all those steps may seem like alot but it honestly only takes me about 15 min.
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Take Care,

-Ryan Homsey

www.topnotchboas.com