It was a fun and informative night at COBA last night. I spoke about white balance and my wedding invitations. I demonstrated the use of various white balance products, including the EXPOdisc, WhiBal, gray cards, WB presets, and RAW. I’ll see if I can clean up the presentation and post it online. Suffice it to say, all of the products seem to do a reasonable job of ensuring better white balance than AWB. My biggest recommendation from the evening is to shoot RAW and deal with the WB later.
Not to be left out is the fact that sometimes we don’t want color accuracy in our photos. Achieving proper white balance shouldn’t always be the goal, unless you’re a commercial photographer shooting the next new widget!
In the gallery below, there’s an EXPOdisc shot from within SLAC’s Orange Room where we hold the COBA meetings. Has anyone ever set a custom white balance using another camera’s photo? I wonder if this 1D Mark II image would create some very interesting color renditions in photos from a Nikon, Olympus, or Sigma camera. Anyone care to test out the next time we’re in SLAC’s Orange Room?
Last on the evening’s agenda was a recap of how Rae and I created our wedding invitations. I felt everyone had a blast with this presentation, and it was certainly easier on my part preparing that than boning up on white balance theories and facts!
Several people mentioned submitting a story idea to magazines like Rangefinder or various Photoshop magazines. Sounds like a good idea! Anyone know a story editor that I can contact?
tow.com 
When it comes to White Balance, I had undergone three stages.
The first one is where I was hopeless and did not remedy the problem though I knew it was a problem. This is when I was in college and shooting in the classes (under flourescent light) with film. Yes, FILM like Kodak NPC. It was just too expensive to correct the problem.
My second stage came when I can cheaply correct the WB. The digital age! I use the gray card, the white card, and the black card when I do products or portraits.
The third stage is now, where I realize…what the hack, you don’t really want perfect WB because there is never a perfect white light condition in real life when we look at things!
So now, I try to show warm colors if pic is taken in a restaurant. I correct WB slightly so that the resulting pic is not too red or yellow. But I keep the red and the yellow.
Lighting inside a plane is very interesting. I have many pictures taken inside an airliner like a 737, and almost every one of them gives me the result slightly different than what I expected.
Sorry…I missed this COBA meeting. I missed many of them. I will try harder to be there next time. Have a topic like shooting nude models!! I will NOT miss it.