I don’t generally talk about camera equipments. I feel like I have to apologize for talking about cameras rather than photography. Well, here’s the apology: sorry, gear talk ahead…
Michael Johnston’s excellent blog references President Elect Obama’s official portrait and a discussion ensues on the difficulty of capturing Mr. Obama’s skin color. During the campaign, I was often aghast at how bad some of the online news photographs were with his skin being frequently more yellow than not. So I have to agree that this official portrait seems to capture the skin color quite a bit better.
Then I remember my own episode this last November at LosCon, where I was doing official masquerade photos. The setting is a small hotel function room. I have about 30 seconds to take a few shots of a masquerade entrant before the next one, so there isn’t much time fussing around. Since an entry may have just one person or a large group of people, I put the softbox at about 60 degrees to the right and a umbrella light about 45 degrees to the left. This generally works well for just about anything.
Anyway, Calvin showed up in a white cloak *smack head*. I was shooting tethered to the laptop and since it is an old laptop, I was only shooting JPG to speed up the display. Once again, I am reminded how good the Olymps E-3 white balance and JPG engine are. The image speaks for itself, the color is spot on. I have taken ~20,000 photos since Feb 2008 with the E-3, and one of the best features is that I hardly have to do any color correction. Well done, Olympus!
