MORE HDR PHOTOS, RAW AND WHITE BALANCE

We went out early this morning right after the sun came up to the Royal Oak train station. Here are a few HDR shots.

This is a derelict loading docket in the deep south end of Royal Oak. I drove by it earlier in the week and thought it would make a good shot.

As usual I took three exposures for each scene, one shot two stops underexposed, another normal exposure, and another two stops overexposed. I recorded the shots in RAW mode. RAW image files, unlike TIFF or JPEGS, captures all of the data from a camera’s image sensor. It also allows for accurate image post-processing and correction. Things like white balance, saturation, contrast and sharpness are easily corrected, where you have to fiddle around with JPEGS to correct them, if at all.

I’m glad I shot the scenes in RAW mode, since I forgot to set the white balance correctly. Last night I was playing with the white balance settings and left it set on tungsten. That’s good for shooting indoors by incandescent light, but terrible for shooting outdoors in the morning. When we got back home I downloaded the photos and every shot was blue-tinged. We spent a couple of hours shooting and the light was good, so we couldn’t go back and reshoot. This was easy to fix. In the editor (Canon Digital Photo Professional) I just changed the white balance to ‘cloudy’ and the colors returned to what I saw in the viewfinder. If I hadn’t shot the scenes in RAW, I would have been in big trouble.

The Good:

– RAW mode captures the image on a camera sensor with very little processing.

• Correcting an exposure is a lot easier in RAW mode.

The Bad:

• RAW files are at least 2 to 6 times larger than JPEGs.
• Can’t take as many pictures.
• Takes up tons of disk space on your computer.

I use an external hard drive to store RAW files. Also, with each shoot I create an accompanying Word document detailing the location, exposure values and tone mapping settings so I can accurately duplicate scenes that come out well.

So what is white balance? It’s how your camera interprets white. Think of it as kind of a zero point for color. If the zero is set correctly, the colors will be correct. If not, the colors will be offset or skewed, like my blue-tinged exposures were. Most digital cameras have a white balance adjustment. My main camera is a Canon T2i (or 550D outside the U.S.), but even my little 125 dollar Nikon Coolpix has a white balance adjustment. Try using it- it’s easy and you will notice a big difference in your digital photographs.