Photo Gadget: White Balance Lens Cap

Photojojo are pimping out this cute little white balance lens cap. It’s a clever gadget that does what it says on the can - let you set the white balance on your advanced digital camera without any extra bits and bobs, like white cards. You simply leave the lens cap on your camera, than take a photo in manual white balance mode and voila! Your camera will have a much better idea of the local white balance conditions and your photos will look much closer to what you want, with less tinkering about in RAW once you get home. And it’s much simpler than finding a handy local white wall (that may not be white) and shooting towards that.

Related Posts:

> Set your camera’s white balance

> Use RAW with your digital camera

Advanced Tip: Fix your White Balance

Digital cameras have a huge advantage over film cameras - they don’t use film. As well as saving you a fortune in buying the stuff and getting it developed, this also means you can do some magic with how the digital ‘film’ in your camera responds to the light that it receives. You can change the effective ISO, the light sensitivity of the film for one, but the biggest effect can come from adjusting your camera’s white balance settings to match the local light sources - from daylight, to fluorescents to flash.

What is White Balance you ask..

Not sure what ‘White Balance’ can do for you? Well not all light is created equal - the colours that come from bright sunlight are different from those that appear under bulb light indoors, with the later tending to be more orangey-red with tungsten bulbs, or even a lurid green with fluorescents. Normally most cameras sit in AWB (Auto White Balance) mode, which means they look at the surrounding light conditions and adjust what they take to make white look white in your photo, rather than some off-white shade. This is a digital only feature, with film cameras you have to manually work out what light is around and use different coloured filters to adjust the light - something you can do with digital to get interesting effects.

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Sad News: JPG Mag Closes its Doors

As the global recession trundles on into 2009 we’re seeing more and more companies unable to make ends meet - and although most of those are financial, housing related or retail, sometimes they impact us photographers more. Unfortunately one of these has already happened - JPG Mag, has decided to close its doors as of Monday 5th January. JPG mag was a wonderful web based magazine that let photographers upload their favourite images based around a monthly theme, then site visitors would vote on the best photos which would then make it into the print magazine. A great concept, but unfortunately they’ve not been able to make the figures work in the down-turn. Good luck in the future guys. Oh, and if you’re quick you can download free PDFs of many of the magazines to see some of the stunning photos they printed.

On the positive side, this season’s sales have been epic to say the least. So pull together your camera wish list, count your pennies and head out into the melee to see what deals you can get. Or if that seems like a bit too much money to spend right now, take solace in the fact that digital photography is one of the cheapest ways to entertain yourselves and your friends there is that still involves being creative rather than sitting glued to the TV. Get on out there, take some wonderful pictures. Say ‘cheese’, everyone! And a Happy New Year to all from Digital Photography Hints.

Popular Posts from 2008 (Happy 2009!)

Happy New Year photography fans! 2009 looks to be an interesting one for most of us - the economy is unhappy - thankfully digital photography is cheap and fun, Obama is about to become US president, and Canon has just released another must-have SLR - the Canon EOS 5D Mark II
(congratulations all of you who got one of those in your Christmas stocking).

So with no further head, here are our top 5 most read posts in 2008:

> Add RAW to your Canon G7: pretty clearly showing that Canon was a bit stupid in not putting RAW into this popular prosumer camera, a mistake they rectified in more recent versions.

> Camera Classic: Yashica T4 Super: A great little non-digital camera, now if only someone would release a digital equivalent.

> Camera Care in Cold Weather: Digital cameras don’t like the cold, so make sure you look after them. This is close to our hearts right now as England goes through the coldest weather we’ve had in many years.

> The Law and Taking Photos: The ongoing battle between photographers and people afeared of terrorism continued. Hopefully soon we’ll start to recover our senses and realise that people standing around obviously taking photos with big cameras are probably not planning something bad.

> Save Photos in RAW: RAW may take a bit more space on your memory card, but if you want the best photos you can take then it’s a must do.

So there you have it. Who knows what we’ll be writing about here in a year’s time, the only sure thing is that it will be about digital photography in all its forms. Happy snapping everyone!

Interesting Photos: One Model Made to Look Many Ages

Take one 20 year old model, apply some makeup (or less makeup), clever positioning and some changes of clothes and voila - you can see what she might look like at 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 years. This shoot was originally from Paris Vogue, Nov ‘08 - Found here.