I walked around Eastern Market in DC yesterday with my wife and some friends. It was a particularly overcast time of the day, with sparse photographic opportunities, but I was determined to snap a few shots before heading home for the day. I encountered this painter below in a deep conversation with a young art student. (on a side note, I really need to get some monitor calibration going here)
Click to see a larger version
I stumbled across this post on fotohacker.com: “White Balance Reloaded”.
I don’t mean to be critical of the site for propagating slightly inaccurate information because the post is very good information for the amateur photographer, however I believe that they oversimplify and repeat some misconceptions about light color that serve only to obfuscate one of the most fundamental aspects of image capture. Camera manufacturers are somewhat complicit in this simplification of lighting color by using Kelvin numbers as white balance settings, but it’s important to remember that “Color Temperature”, “Color Balance” and “White Balance” are all different things.
Everybody loves cheap, but cheap comes with some specific costs.
Want a low-priced CFL bulb? No problem, but don’t expect color rendering to be very reliable. Want a cheap bulb housing? No problem, but be prepared to work with some crappy mounting options, limited flexibility and a 6′ cord.
I am an artistic person. I am a creative person. I am NOT an artist, and I am certainly not a designer.
The topic for the day it to know your limits because the logo above proves the value of this concept to me. I could not create the logo above, and the fact that it pieced together from such obvious yet elusive elements tells me that there is so much to design that I could never understand in my lifetime lest I dedicate myself to becoming a designer. Our dear friend Sara Tomko gifted us with a new logo for our site “the Fashionable Foodie” and she knocked it out of the park on the first try.
Now that we’ve established the potential pitfalls of fluorescent lighting, it was now my ambition to see if I could build an off-the-shelf lighting system using parts from Home Depot. In some ways I was successful, and in others I faced some intersting limitations.
Knowing that the end goal is shooting some of the food we cook for my wife’s site The Fashionable Foodie, I decided that I would set a few parameters before shopping. Since we’re both new at this, I wanted to minimize as many variables as possible. We have very little experience plating, styling, photographing, lighting and setting scenery, so I thought it would be best to cut out table settings entirely. I decided to begin by building a table-top cyclorama to shoot all the subjects on a plain white background for simplicity’s sake.