Everyone will enjoy the hobby in their own way. If you're into Landscape photography I'll suggest that, until you figure out the details of UniWB, you'll probably find it simpler and more useful bracket your exposures. Even after you figure out the settings for UniWB you'll probably do that anyway.
Frankly, even if I thought my metering was perfect I would still bracket the exposures. The technically perfect exposure is often not the artistically most desirable result, and I like having options. I'm not trying to discourage you from pursuing your technical goals. If that's what you enjoy, by all means do it. I'm just saying that photography is a much less precise pursuit than you might think if you read a lot of discussions on the Internet. Thom Hogan writes quite a bit about UniWB in his guides for the various Nikon camera models. To paraphrase Hogan, UniWB makes little or no difference unless you are shooting in high contrast oddly lit situations. If you set the camera white balance close to how you will eventually render the photo, the R, G and B channel histograms will be close enough. Here are a couple of quotes from one of his guides. "UniWB is something the perfectionist uses, not something every shooter should be using. The closer you are to a novice, the more likely that you have bigger problems than small discrepancies int the RGB histogram to worry about." "The trouble with UniWB is that if you leave it active while shooting it removes your ability to assess color on the camera's LCD, it also corrupts the color of the embedded (or attached) JPEG and it requires that you manually adjust the white balance with a raw converter later (and the converter better be using precision math, otherwise some of the highlights can get tints to them.)" He recommends that UniWB be saved as one of the custom WB's and used when you think you might need it. After reading what he had to say, (and never really having much of a problem anyway) I decided that, for me, UniWB is more trouble than it is worth and probably buys more problems than it solves. It would probably lead me farther from the art part of photography. You may feel different about your own work. gs George Sinos -------------------- www.GeorgesPhotos.net www.GeorgeSinos.com On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Ciprian Dorin Craciun <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 7:32 PM, Charles Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: >> However - in real-world shooting: I've been shooting RAW since about March >> of 2008 - starting with my K10D, then the K7, and now the K5. I've never >> had a problem with "not knowing what I get". The images largely just work, >> especially now with the K5 and its more-accurate metering and much-wider >> exposure latitude. >> >> Certainly it's worked closely-enough that I can rely on the crappy JPEG >> preview of the image to know that I'm in the right ballpark. > > I just wonder what you mean by "worked closely-enough"? Have you > tweaked some settings to get the JPEG much closer to the "raw" image? > > >> I'd advocate not worrying about it until you come into a situation where the >> lack of specifics causes you grief (not MEASURE grief, but the inability to >> use the image) and then you can worry about fixing the problem. > > I think that in landscape (or "outdoor") photography, where there > is a lot of dynamic range, I could encounter this situation pretty > often. (Although I think I have to do something really wrong to get an > unusable photo...) > > Ciprian. > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
