The ExpoDisc by ExpoImaging is a white-balance tool for photographers. View ExpoDisc Details.

I’ve seen several photographers that have used this tool in the near past, and have been fascinated. I love a new gadget or accessory but before I buy, I do an incredible amount of research. I squeeze every drop of ‘searchability’ out of Google, reading forums and reviews. Once a product makes it through my initial review process, I then add it to my B&H Wishlist. Once it comes time to purchase the accessory I go back and do a quick review again. My quick review often consists of two things: visit B&H and check out the reviews and check my Google Reader, just to confirm my initial thoughts. I use Google Reader to manage all the blogs I follow! What’s really nice, is I can type in ‘ExpoDisc’ into Google Reader, and it brings up all the blog posts where a photographer has used or talked about the product.

(Left: Auto-White Balance, Right: ExpoDisc Neutral)

The above image has no post-processing done, and to the naked eye, the chair is blue not purple. Straight out of camera, resized and posted to the web. For the first image (left), I set the camera’s white-balance to ‘Auto’. For the second image (right), the camera’s white-balance was set to custom and calibrated using the ExpoDisc. There are a lot of white-balance tools our there: gray cards, white cards and calibration targets. All of these tools have the same thing in common, they both have to be placed somewhere in the frame and need to be adjusted in post-production. The ExpoDisc is different, it snaps on to the end of your lens, you set the custom white-balance and you’re done. You don’t have to ask your model to hold your gray card for you, it only takes 15 seconds or so to set the white-balance. For NIKON users: Set your white-balance to ‘PRE’, then hold down the ‘WB’ button until ‘PRE’ starts blinking on your screen. At this point place the ExpoDisc over your lens, press the shutter button. If the white balance was properly calibrated your screen will display ‘GOOD’. Pop the ExpoDisc off and start shooting. The ExpoDisc can be used in natural light or even mixed lighting situations. I wish I would have had this tool when I was doing a lot of shooting in poorly lit gyms and football fields.

I chose the ExpoDisc Neutral, because I wanted to have a tool that created a consistent white-balance across all shots. When you have a proper white-balance set, your exposure and noise levels are cleaner and your images appear more crisp (sharp). ExpoDisc makes a ‘Portrait’ version, which warms the white-balance slightly. If you have extra money to throw away, feel free to buy both. But I would recommend buying the largest ExpoDisc neutral for your biggest lens, and using that as your base. If you want to ‘warm’ up your images in post-production, you can easily do that in Camera Raw. Since you have a base white-balance established, you can simple adjust the first image in Camera Raw and then apply the white-balance adjustment to all images. This will give you consistent results across all your images in a set.

I leave you with a pic of my son, being so patient with me as I tested out some things. I got some more ‘toys’ last week that I plan to share with you all. So stick around for more stuff. I bought mine here.

Tomorrow I’m excite to have Nicola from Nicola Herring Photography over to talk about lighting. If you aren’t familiar with Nicola’s work you have to check her out at http://nicolaherring.com/. Her newborn work is incredible as well as her wedding photography!

Mixing ambient light and flash, can be a tricky thing. The biggest hurdle that most people can get frustrated with is White Balance. The biggest white balance delima for most photographers is dealing with tungsten or incadescent lighting and trying to mix that with flash. Now I realize these aren’t amazing pictures, but I was just trying to demo a concept.

In the below image, the far left picture is shot available light only with white balance set to tungsten/incandescent(2850K). The middle image is the same camera settings, except just adding flash. The flash was a speedlight with a Rogue Flash Bender as the modifier. Notice how the flash creates a blue hue across the image. Speedlights/strobes are supposed to be white balanced for daylight approx (5500K). That’s a lot cooler than the 2850K tungsten color temperature. This can be very tricky to think about. Usually when we think of something having a higher temperature as being warmer, and something with a lower temperature as being cooler. However when it comes to light temperature the opposite of what we naturally think is true, color temperatures over 5000K are considered cool and temperatures under 3500K are warmer colors. If you really think about this you can figure it out. For example, when you light a match the flame is yellow, however when you light your gas stove the flame is blue. This is because gas burns hotter (blue) than wood (warm). Make sense?

In general it is a good practice to have all of your light sources to have the same color temperature if you want them to blend well. So in order to take a color temperature strobe from 5500K to 2850K we need to warm up the temperature of the strobe. This is where gels come in handy. CTO (Color Temperature Orange) is a standard gel that takes a daylight temperature strobe and balances it with 2850K tungsten light. The result is a constant light temperature across the image at 2850K. I know this wasn’t an exhaustive study on light, but I hope it spurs some thought and creativity.

I just threw this pic in for fun. I only took one shot, so I realize I could have made several changes. First the vase is backwards, the sticks should have been towards the back of the flowers not in front. Second, I would have picked a different gel color, but hey I was rushing around. Anyway what I wanted to demonostrate was two concepts. First concept is shooting on a gray seamless allows the addition of color into your image by putting colored gels over your stobes. This was lit with 2 strobes. The key/fill light was just a shoot through umbrella camera left at 45°. The background light was above and slightly behind the flowers without any modifier on it. The second thing I wanted you to notice is the fall off on the background light. I felt by gelling this light, it accented the fall off of a bare bulb strobe. (yeah yeah, I hear the critics saying that by gelling the strobe I’m diffusing the light, so it’s not really a bare bulb, but come on it’s close enough and get’s the point across.)