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Author: Rick_Lee, Contributing Editor
| Even if you use a grey-card to take an exposure reading from, your slides still may be just a little bit light or dark. It is a good idea to "bracket" your exposures. This means, shoot some at the recommended exposure, but also shoot some 1/2 stop overexposed, shoot some 1 stop overexposed, shoot some 1/2 stop underexposed and shoot some 1 stop underexposed. If you find that you are never off by more than 1/2 stop, then eliminate the full stop brackets. If you find that your grey-card readings are always right on the money, then stop bracketing and wasting film. If you find that your grey-card readings are always 1/2 stop dark, then just open up 1/2 stop and don't bracket. |
| You may want to actually take a photograph of the grey-card in front of a piece of art. Your color lab can use that photo to gauge your density (lightness/darkness) and color balance... which brings us to... |
COLOR BALANCE. If you are using a digital camera, you can change the setting for daylight (or daylight balanced flash) or incandescent light. The lights in your cheapo lamps from Home Depot will be incandescent. If you are shooting 35mm film, you might either use film that is balanced for incandescent such as Ektachrome Tungsten film or you might use a blue filter... called an 80B filter... to filter out the warm reddish-yellow light of the incandescent (tungsten) lamps. If you shoot daylight-balanced film (the normal kind) with incandescent lamps, your pictures will look like this: |
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| If you want slides, I recommend a type of film called Ektachrome 64T. This is available from better photography stores. It is very sharp and is balanced for tungsten incandescent lights. If you want the absolute best in color balance, you might go to a camera store and get some BBA Photo Flood bulbs. These go in a standard household screw-in lamp base (such as the one I pictured above) but they are perfectly color balanced at 3200 (degrees Kelvin) which is what Ektrachrome 64T is balanced for. These are 250 watt bulbs. They burn out very quickly so don't waste them. |
| You might also use "quartz halogen" lights. These go in special lamps and they are very bright... usually 500 to 1000 watts. Don't burn yourself. Halogen lights from the hardware store often have wire cages over the lamps. I suppose you'd have remove those cages to get even light on your art. Don't blame me if you burn yourself or catch your house on fire. They are usually color balanced at 3400K rather than 3200K but the difference is slight and you shouldn't notice a problem with the 64T film. |
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