Cincinnati Photography Meetup
Posted by Doug Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:55:00 GMT
As part of my new hobby, I went in search of other local folks interested in photography. There’s a Cincinnati Photography group on Meetup.com. When I first joined, there was hardly anyone in the group and it was languishing. Last week the group organizer sent out a plea for help. I think coincidentally about 10 new people joined and not so coincidentally about 10 people committed to coming to January’s meetup. Last night was our meetup.
Overall it was pretty cool. There were about 7 older guy there that had been shooting since Ansel Adams started, one college kid, one girl, a couple of guys my age, Britton Fraley (from #photography on IRC), and myself. The meeting seemed to take a while to get started. Many of the guys (and girl) seemed to know each other from “way back”. There was a lot of chit-chat about, “Remember when we did…” As one of the outsiders, this part of the meeting was fairly boring and just seemed to stress that I was on the outside.
After about an hour of this, Britton pulled out his Expodisc. Turns out the group organizer is an Expodisc nut. No one really believing how totally awesome these things are, cameras started coming out. Here’s how it works. All digital cameras suck at getting colors right indoors without a flash. This is a function of the “automatic white balance” (or lack thereof). The camera can’t tell what’s white under indoor lighting conditions and so the colors (which are mostly based on what’s white) are all tinted funny (usually yellow). Expodisc solves this problem. You snap this filter onto your lens (I had thought it screwed on like most other filters, but it does just snap on and snap off). Take a picture of your subject. The result is a picture that’s pretty much solid “white”. The truth is that it’s what color the camera thinks is white. Now go to your menu (these instructions are for the CanonDigitalRebel?) and select “Custom WB”. The camera now wants you to select which photo to use as the white balance adjustment. The last photo you took (the mostly all white photo) is the default, so just press the “Select” button. Now go to the white balance selector (half-shutter press to exit the menu, then the “WB” button) and select “Custom” (which has some weird icon). That’s it! Now when you shoot the same subject (or any subject in the same lighting conditions) the camera has a very clear idea of what white is. Colors come out dramatically better if not “bang on”.
Part of what we did was do a series of “before” and “after” shots showing how well it worked. What I was pleased to see is how few steps it takes to setup. Interestingly, the organizer, Dennis, had a Nikon D100 there. His processes for setting up the Expodisc was much more complicated by at least two or three extra steps. Also interesting was that his camera exhibited the exact same color tinting with indoor, no flash photos as the Canon Digital Rebel. I had thought that Canon’s white balance was just all whacked out. Turns out Nikon’s is too under the same circumstances. At least I know it’s not just a Canon-ism.
Dennis said, “The Expodisc is the greatest thing to happen to digital photography since the coffee filter.” It turns out that prior to the Expodisc, he did the same thing by putting three (and he was very specific about that) white coffee filters over his lens and shooting just like he had an Expodisc. 
Of course, I had to try this as soon as I got home. Carla is all to aware of the color tint on indoor shots and all to aware of how much trouble I go through to get rid of it. I was able to demostrate nearly identical results as the Expodisc with the coffee filters. The reason Dennis bought multiple Expodiscs at some non-trivial expense is, “when I’m charging some chick a lot of money to photograph her wedding I can’t hold up coffee filters to my camera.”
In other news, I was able to demo IView MediaPro to Britton on my PowerBook. He kept saying, “This doesn’t look too complicated, you should write an app like this open source.” I’ve thought the same thing; and his comment was very flattering. However, in using iVMP regularly I notice how many, many small details there are to get right. The level of effort to implement iVMP is definitely non-trivial.
It was quite clear to me that I was probably the least experienced photographer there. In my defense, I think there were only three or four who are more knowledgeable than I about image processing. There were three there who hadn’t made the switch at all over to digital. Bless his heart, there was one older guy who was trying to understand the digital workflow. It was clear that he and computers in general didn’t get along very well. I wish him luck. There’s so much to learn about post-processing and asset management. As Britton said, “It’s a whole other skill apart from photography.”
