Bob writes: : >Karl Shah-Jenner - prickly pear : Well, from the title I was expecting a group portrait of Faul and : Little :o) : : Lots of colour (you still using the old colonial spelling over there I : see :) colour-contrast, saturation and diagonals. It's a simple image : with a simple message. So much is out of focus but that almost draws : my eye in towards the pear itself. I'm not even convinced it would : have worked so well had everything been sharp front to back ... I : suspect it would have become just another botanical record. I have the botanical record sharp shots - boring as bat sh*t and the colour does nowt for the image.. In the past I printed a bunch of this one on Ilfoflex RA4 polyester base material (like cibachrome, just that it uses neg images rather than pos) and it really pops. RA4 paper looks OK too, but a lot flatter, but I've almost sold out of them. Sadly, Ilfoflex paper in sheet form is no more. : Just a thought though ... If you had taken this with a digital SLR : how would auto-white-balance have coped? hmm, well lets think, there was a slight warm bias to the light it's self and the image really is populated with strong colours - I wonder too how the bayer arrays would have coped with it ? Unlikely the sky would have reached the saturation it did in this shot - I guess a more 'realistic' (balanced to 5500) shot would have seen a more cyan sky rather that this almost artificial blue.. : There's no neutral tones anywhere. Come to think of it ... how : exactly is auto-white balance supposed to work? My guess is that since the camera can't see the ambient light because it's only seeing what comes thru the lens, it would take the average of the lot and attempt to balance accordingly - and most of the time (like AE) it would get it right(ish). The only way to *really* get WB correct is to do the same as we've always done when it comes to colour balance and either: A. use a colour temp meter to measure the ambient light and filter appropriately, setting the white balance to daylight or B. Do as the video guys do and use a white card to set the WB manually (probably still filtering appropriately first.. as the video guys do) After all, digital cameras are really analogue video still cameras with digitisers (AD converters) on board. k
