In the same fine scientific spirit that inspires the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory ( ie. light the fuse and run like hell...) I decided to test out three of the products that we sell here at the shop - working in conjunction with each other. Those of you with a technical bent may find that this is technically...bent. But read on.
I have a very mixed lighting situation here at the Editorial Centre ( the old storeman's desk ). There are two fluorescent lights above the desk with three disparate tubes. One is yellow, one is pink, and one is green. I feel like a tray of mince set out in the butchers. At the end of the day. Cheap.
My Fuji X-10 has a number of ways to set the white balance. Auto, custom, fluorescent 1, 2, and 3. I decided to see if they worked and to add the further factor of an Expodisc to see if it did as it claimed.
The target was a sort of cheap Macbeth card that we had in the cabinet downstairs - not a real X-rite card, just a substitute.
Here are the results - in case the hand-written notes don't show, they are auto, custom, flourescent 2 and 3, and Expodisc.
My conclusion is that the Expodisc does as good as a custom white balance off a pure white card. Of course this IS a custom white balance, but done through a scrambling filter and done very conveniently whenever you change your lighting setup.
It isn't available in a small enough size to be really useful for the X-10 but it is readily adapted to the lenses on my DSLR. I should think it would be a real boon to those people who shoot all natural light in changing conditions - particularly if they do not have the comfort of RAW files to fall back upon.
The heading image? Chelsea Bunz of course.
