White Balance discussion

[jonix]

for the exact same reason of having trouble with mwb i saved up and bought an inon strobe. having said that, for more than a year i shot using just the internal flash of my canon a95 p&s calibrating white balance against a white slate for each and every time just before i take a shot. i mostly do macro and when calibrating i have the slate 2-3 inches away from the lens. doesn't matter what depth i am as long as i'm shooting macro. doing this with or without flash. yes i get good exposure and made me a believer of mwb. for wide angle though this i've noticed this only is good at shallower depths where there is more ambient light.

am no pro. just my two cents.

link to some photos using manual white balance and internal flash:
Mike Veitch's Anilao Photo Workshop - August 2006 - a photoset on Flickr

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

for the exact same reason of having trouble with mwb i saved up and bought an inon strobe. having said that, for more than a year i shot using just the internal flash of my canon a95 p&s calibrating white balance against a white slate for each and every time just before i take a shot. i mostly do macro and when calibrating i have the slate 2-3 inches away from the lens. doesn't matter what depth i am as long as i'm shooting macro. doing this with or without flash. yes i get good exposure and made me a believer of mwb. for wide angle though this i've noticed this only is good at shallower depths where there is more ambient light.

am no pro. just my two cents.

link to some photos using manual white balance and internal flash:
Mike Veitch's Anilao Photo Workshop - August 2006 - a photoset on Flickr

In most macro photography, WB is not an issue as the entire frame is lit up with the strobe. Both my 5050 and S70 take very nice macro-ish shots with internal flash and everything in auto (5050 better at the extremes). For close-up flash or strobe photos, the adjustment freedom of RAW is not as big a deal as the full resolution for large printing, since the flash/auto gives images that need little adjustment (PS auto-color removes the excessive red in many cases).

When there is a distant background, the WB is going to affect the colors that are not lit-up by the flash/strobe. Adjusting WB in PS sometimes does not give me pleasing background colors. Often with Elements 4 I get excessive banding. Using curves in full PS gives smoother results of backgrounds, but requires more practice and study.

To summarize; for close full frame flash or strobe photography, the image will not vary much in general appearance (RAW/auto WB, RAW/MWB, SF/auto WB, SF/MWB). Only with ambient photo's and photo's with ambient backgrounds will MWB &/or RAW have significant results.

I shoot with WB set to auto and always in RAW. There is often considerably more computer work for the ambient parts this way. My biggest question would be, does the MWB make the image look like it looked to your eye on the dive or does it make it look better than you saw it (un-real)?

 

[jonix]

agree with you. since i got my strobe i just leave wb to auto and it works fine. happy me.

in so far as i recall when i still had no strobes, the images i shot at shallower depths (10ft?) using only ambient light and mwb tended to show colors with lesser saturation as compared to how i saw it.

 

[kreuzerkrieg]

According to Howard Hall's "Successful Underwater Photography" brain tends to compensate lack of red light waves, so actually by using flash you just put the lost light back on film, thus you should get what you see by naked eye

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

According to Howard Hall's "Successful Underwater Photography" brain tends to compensate lack of red light waves, so actually by using flash you just put the lost light back on film, thus you should get what you see by naked eye

Well that theory might almost be valid for shallow snorkel-ish photos but since you have less and less light other than blue to work with as you go deeper, there is eventually no color for the eye to compensate. Part of my deep dive in PADI AOW is taking something red down with you; at 60 feet it might look brown but at 100 feet is is looking pretty black. With a strobe it looks red, but my eye did not see red until the strobe fired.

If Mr. Hall is not a moron, the above statement must be taken out of context or something.

 

[jkling17]

This will help you out: Jeff's UW Photography Page - see the connecting page for UW Photo Basics.

Jeff