Started taking some Macro photos of my tank with my new Olympus E-510 DSLR. The photos were taken with a Sigma 105mm Macro lens which is specifically made for the 4/3 rd's system Olympus. There are basically two ways of white balancing (WB) your camera. One way is to allow the camera to do it by Auto WB (AWB) or you can set the WB yourself, which is called Custom WB (CWB). Most cameras also have a WB mode that you can set by choosing one of the preset color temperatures based on a Kelvin scale, ie, Cloudy (6000K), Tungsten (3000K), White Flourescent (4000K), etc.. However, selecting one of those presets usually leads to very poor WB unless conditions are exactly the way they are supposed to be, which in photography is never the case. So, what is one to do? Well the answer is to set a CWB for each condition that your are photographing under. Basically you would use either a grey or white sheet with the light reflecting on same & then, after selecting CWB, aim the camera at the sheet & take a picture. Well you are not really taking a picture but rather are letting the camera "see" & "record" what "White" should look like when recorded by the camera's sensor. It is a very easy thing to do & can make a very big difference in the photographic image.

This first picture was take by using the camera's AWB. You can see that although the color green is recorded, it is washed out & just doesn't look right.

The next picture is virtually the same photo taken the same way but this time I did a CWB first before taking the picture. You can see the obvious difference between these two pictures.

BTW, both of those pictures were shot in the 'RAW' format rather than the 'JPEG' format. What's the difference you ask? Well, RAW format would be similar to a negative taken in the old 35mm film format. One had to then "process" this negative and had a lot of lattitude regarding how the picture wound up looking. This is true for RAW on a digital camera whereby the processing is done in the computer rather than in the camera as in the JPEG format. RAW stands for well RAW whereas JPEG stands for "Joint Photographic Experts Group". I have learned to always shoot in the RAW format as you have much more leeway when it comes to processing the photo.

Anyway, here are a few more shots taken with Macro in the RAW format:

I hope that you enjoyed the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them!

Comments appreciated.

Steve

Anthony Calfo

For those of you that are not familiar with f-stop, it's the size of the opening that lets light into the camera. Unfortunately, the numbers are reversed, ie, an f-stop of 2 is very wide open & lets a lot of light in, therefore, the depth of field (DOF) is very limited but shutter speeds are very fast. Whereas, an f-stop of 22 is the size of pinhole & lets very little light in, therefore, an infinite DOF but this also requires a much longer shutter speed. So, the key is to find an appropriate combination of f-stop & shutter speed, depending on the amount of light available, in order to get a picture that is not only in sharp focus but also has the correct color balance.

I will try to post follow ups to this thread as I fool with this camera some more. Since it's my first DSLR, the learning curve is immense.

Steve