*** From the Archives ***

This article is from March 7, 2007, and is no longer current.

Framed & Exposed: Great Camera Gear

I was thinking of writing about lens diffraction effects and how they can affect the sharpness of your image and, more specifically, how they might impact sharpness at much larger apertures than you expect. But then I thought, “Nah, a column about cool gear would be a lot more fun.”
Let’s face it: At one time or another, all of us become convinced that if we just buy a new lens, we’ll be much better photographers. That is, of course, nonsense. When this malaise strikes, leading you to scour the Web for the some super-fast, stabilized, incredibly pricey piece of glass, you have two choices. You can either come to terms with the fact that what will make you a better photographer would be to take your current lens and go outside and practice, or you can convince yourself that a different, cheaper piece of gear will make you a better photographer.
Fortunately, there are lots of very cool, relatively inexpensive camera accessories. What’s more, while they won’t truly make you a better photographer, they will make some of your photographic chores much easier. Here are three of my current favorites.
WhiBal Card
Accurate white balance can mean the difference between a usable and unusable image. While most auto white balance mechanisms these days are good, for truly accurate white balance you need to use your camera’s manual white balance feature.
If you’re a Raw shooter, you might think you don’t have to be very particular about white balance because you can so easily alter it after the fact. This is true, but identifying the right white balance in post-production isn’t always easy. You can greatly speed your editing workflow by shooting a reference image with a white balance card.
With a white balance reference in your shot, you can use your Raw converter’s white balance eye dropper to set an extremely accurate white balance. Just click with the eye dropper on your white balance reference, then copy those settings to all of the other images that you shot in that same lighting.
For JPEG shooters, you can use the neutral dropper in your Levels dialog box to neutralize any color casts by clicking on the white balance card in your reference image.
When choosing a white balance reference, a lot of people use the same middle gray card that they use for exposure metering. While this works, a much better choice is a calibrated white balance card, such as the WhiBal G6 card.
Starting at $30 for the pocket-sized kit, the WhiBal is a gray card that has been hand-measured to be completely neutral. No matter what light you put it in, it will always yield a completely neutral response with no metameric shift.
The WhiBal card is extremely well made from light yet sturdy foam. It’s waterproof, so you can use it in foul weather -– it even floats so you don’t have to worry if you drop it in a lake. It’s completely neutral all the way through. If it gets scuffed or scratched on the front, you can sand the surface down to reveal a clean, still completely neutral gray.
The $30 kit includes a lanyard for easy carrying, a simple table stand, and a small envelope-style carrying case. The card itself is the same size as a business card, so you can even carry it in your wallet. Larger sizes are also available, but the pocket size is so convenient, it’s hard to imagine wanting to carry anything larger.
Figure 1 shows two images. I shot the left photo with the Auto White Balance on my Canon EOS 20D. Plainly, the shady light screwed up the auto white balance, resulting in an image that’s too cool. The right-hand image was taken by manually white balancing off of a piece of white paper, and then shooting. This photo is better, but it’s too yellow.

Figure 1. Here you see an original auto white balance image (left) next to an image I white-balanced by using the camera’s built-in manual white balance and a piece of white paper (right).
To use the WhiBal card, place the card somewhere in your scene and take a reference shot. If you’re shooting Raw, you can easily correct the image by clicking with the white balance eyedropper on the gray card in the reference shot, and then copy that white balance adjustment to your other image (Figure 2).

Figure 2. I first took a shot including the WhiBal card (left), then a second shot (right) I can correct in a Raw converter using the initial shot as a reference.
As long as the WhiBal card is in the same light as your subject, it will deliver an accurate white balance reference, which means it’s also useful for street shooting. Just hold it in front of the camera and take a reference shot. On cloudy days, or in low light or mixed lighting situations, it can make short work of getting an accurate white balance. For example, Figure 3 shows an image that I shot while walking down the street at night. Because I knew that auto white balance wouldn’t deliver a good reading, I held the WhiBal card in front of my camera and took a shot. Later, I used this image to correct the bad white balance in my initial low-light shot.

Figure 3. You can use the WhiBal for street shooting and other extemporaneous work.
The WhiBal even ships with a Photoshop plug-in for neutralizing JPEG images using the WhiBal card. Because the plug-in is calibrated for the specific tones of the WhiBal card, it can sometimes do a better job than using the Neutral dropper in Photoshop’s Levels dialog box.
The WhiBal card is an excellent value that makes getting accurate color much easier.
ExpoDisc
While the WhiBal provides an easy, affordable tool for getting correct white balance in post-production, the ExpoDisc from ExpoImaging helps you get accurate white balance right out of the camera.
Most manual white balance mechanisms require you to point the camera at something white that’s sitting in the light in your scene. They then measure a white balance off of that white thing. With other mechanisms, you take a picture of the white reference in your scene and then use the camera’s interface to select that picture for white balance analysis.
You use the ExpoDisc to shoot the white reference that’s used by your camera’s manual white balance mechanism. A round, filter-like device, the ExpoDisc fits over the end of your lens (Figure 4). It’s not threaded, so you have to hold it there, but only for a single shot. For quick access while shooting, the ExpoDisc includes a lanyard so you can hang it around your neck.

Figure 4. The ExpoDisc and its case.
To use the ExpoDisc, you position yourself within your scene’s lighting, which often means you have to stand where your subject is, and then you shoot back towards your light source with the ExpoDisc over the lens. You then use your camera’s manual white balance feature to select that shot for your manual white balance. That’s all there is to it.
As you can see in Figure 5, the ExpoDisc yields a much better white balance than what you’ll get from white balancing off of a white piece of paper. What’s more, all of your white balance concerns are handled in-camera, so you shouldn’t need to spend post-production time tweaking white balance. This is especially welcome when you’re working with JPEG images, which don’t allow for easy white balance adjustment.

Figure 5. I white-balanced the image on the left off of a white piece of paper. For the image on the right, I white-balanced through the ExpoDisc.
The ExpoDisc costs between $99 and $130, depending on its size. I suggest you buy whatever size is big enough to cover your largest lens, as you’ll be able to use this with all of your smaller lenses. However, if you choose a smaller ExpoDisc, you can always switch to a smaller lens and shoot your white balance reference through that before switching back.
Even if you don’t plan on using an exactly accurate white balance (for example, maybe you expect to warm up your images), an accurate record of correct white balance is useful in case you want to re-purpose those images later.
Like the WhiBal, the ExpoDisc isn’t just for set-up shots. You can easily use both devices for street shooting and other run-and-gun situations.
Epson P-5000 Multimedia Viewer
Flash memory is cheaper than ever, making it pretty simple to stock up on a good supply of storage cards for your camera. However, it’s still hard to beat the price of hard-disk storage. There are a lot of portable, battery-powered, hard-drive-based devices for offloading your images in the field, but the Epson P-series viewers have always been the Cadillacs of multimedia viewers. The $699 P-5000 is Epson’s latest, and the company’s engineers have done an excellent job of adding necessary improvements to the previous generation.
The P-5000 has the same form factor as previous models (Figure 6). It’s roughly the size of a paperback book, with a 4-inch, 640 x 480 LCD screen on the front, some simple navigation controls, and slots in the top for CompactFlash and SD cards. For other card formats, you’ll need an adapter from a third party. Inside the P-5000, an 80 GB hard drive provides a huge amount of storage for still images, movies, and MP3s. A speaker on the bottom of the unit provides audio output for watching movies and slideshows, and A/V connectors let you attach the device to a TV or projector for group viewing.

Figure 6. The Epson P-5000 multimedia viewer provides a 4-inch viewing screen, an 80 GB hard drive, and much faster performance and a better interface than its predecessors.
The P-5000 allows you to view JPEG files, and also Raw files from certain cameras. That includes all the popular SLRs, but check Epson’s Web site to make sure your model is included. The P-5000 can play back movies in the DivX; MPEG 1, 2, and 4; WMV9; H.264; and Motion JPEG video formats. It also supports MP3, AAC and WMA audio formats.
It’s hard to appreciate just how spectacular the P-5000 screen is until you see it. No other multimedia viewer has the same clarity and color fidelity. Viewable from any angle with only minimal contrast or color shifts, the screen provides rich, saturated color and excellent dynamic range. You even have a choice of sRGB or Adobe RGB color space.
You’ll have no trouble reviewing and evaluating images on the P-5000’s display, thanks to its excellent color and clarity. But it’s still a small, portable LCD screen, so Epson has wisely included a histogram display that can be superimposed over your image along with an EXIF readout. The single-channel histogram makes it possible to more accurately judge the exposure of an image, letting you trash bad photos in the field, which saves time in post-production and makes more efficient use of the 80 GB hard drive.
My only complaint about the screen is that it’s covered by a piece of plastic that exhibits a lot of glare. It would be nice if Epson could come up with some kind of non-glare covering for the screen that didn’t compromise its excellent contrast and color rendition.
To transfer images to the P-5000, you simply insert a card and use the menu navigation controls to select Backup. The P-5000 includes its own file structure, and you can easily specify a folder to save into. Transfer times are much speedier than with previous models. On average, it took me a little over 2 minutes to transfer the content of a 1 GB card, and I made it through 25 1GB transfers before the battery finally gave out. The battery is removable, so you can pack multiple batteries for extended field work.
Epson is to be congratulated for speeding up the transfer time, one of the biggest problems with the P-5000’s predecessors. Menu navigation and interface design is also simpler and more streamlined, and the overall interface feels much peppier. The unit will bog down a little bit if you’re viewing a folder with lots of images, but in general it’s quick to navigate and review images.
The P-5000 now allows zooming of supported Raw files so you can check focus on your images. There’s also an internal rating system for filtering, sorting, and finding images based on ratings, but these ratings don’t transfer into ratings you can use in any other photo browser.
To transfer images from the P-5000 to a computer, connect the two using the included USB-2 cable. The P-5000 then appears on your desktop as a hard drive, and you can drag and drop images to and from it.
At $699, the P-5000 is, plainly, not cheap. For that price, you could buy a full-blown Windows laptop to store images, plus check your email and play solitaire. But a cheap laptop is substantially larger than the P-5000. If you’re trying to pack light, a small viewer makes much more sense.
The P-5000 is much more expensive than competing units, but less expensive devices don’t offer anything close to the P-500’s screen. With its high quality and built-in histogram, you truly can use it for field editing. In addition to getting a head start on your workflow, this makes it possible to determine if you got what you needed during your day’s shooting.
Whether the $699 price tag is worth it depends on your workflow in the field. If you like to review your images at the end of the day, or if you’d prefer to edit in the field, you’ll appreciate the P-5000’s high-quality screen and its histogram display, and the ability to show and zoom Raw images. If you routinely make presentations, then you might benefit from the fact that the P-5000 can automatically build presentations from images, complete with transitions and accompanying audio files.
If all you’re looking for is a place to dump images, and you don’t need to review or present them, you’re better off with a less expensive, screen-less model, such as the SmartDisk Photo Bank.
For full featured media mongering, though, the P-5000 is a great unit.
The Last Word
So there you have it: Three gadgets at different price points that you can buy as an alternative to any number of expensive lenses, yet still know that you own a cool photo gizmo. And while no purchase will make you a better photographer, either of the white-balance aids will help achieve better color, and the Epson P-5000 will greatly ease housekeeping chores while you’re shooting in the field.
 

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