White Balancing Problem ( HELP )

[Marc Furth]

I need help, and I don’t know what’s happening. I just built a underwater housing for my Fuji S2 Pro. I do most of my diving in shallow water where I white balance my cameras. I’m having a problem white balancing the S2. I believe I’m white balancing correctly but the camera is not readjusting it’s color. I have a built in white card under my housing that I can swivel out in front of the camera very easily. The instructions say you must place the camera in manual focus. This is not possible at this time for me because I have no control on the barrel of the lens. I believe the reason for placing it in manual is if the camera does not have a focus the shutter will not release and you will not perform the white balance. But this has not been a problem. I place the white card in front of the camera and it takes a few moments to find the focus and I release the shutter and the camera says it has been ( COMPLETE ). Next I take a few pictures and monitor the LCD and the pictures look good. That is, it’s difficult to monitor the color on the LCD but it seems to look good. When I review my images back home the pictures have not been white balanced and are all blue green in color. I have dove 5 time and have taken over 400 pictures
and still no change in white balance. I must be doing something wrong but I’m perplexed.
I have had the Nikon 950, 990 and the 5000 cameras in my own housings and they all white balanced better then this. The reason I bought this camera was it’s low light ability compared to the consumer cameras. But with out a decent white balance it’s useless to me. Please help if you can. Does anyone have any idea, or does anyone know someone I can contact at Fuji that might be able to help. Thanks so much for any help, Marc

http://home.earthlink.net/~blueseas/_uimages/Fujis2proFtbkjpg.jpg

[Tom Cuffari]

Marc,

I am not an expert in undewater photography (or anything else for that matter) but perhaps your problem has to do with the distance of the white card when setting the white balance and the distance of the subjects you are shooting. I would seem to me that as your subject gets further away underwater the color of the light (more water volume between the camera and the subject) changes. Try shooting a subject at the same distance as the white card would be and see if the colors are not more accurate. Hope that helps.

Tom

[Marc Furth]

Hi Tom, Your right the further away you are from your subject the more color you will loose. But I’m very aware of this due to my past experience with other cameras underwater. It’s not performing like other cameras I’ve owned. If you white balance like I do at 15 Feet of water depth you are measuring the amount of light that is filtered down thru the water. I should see
the change in most of all my photography’s as far away as 10 feet from my subject maybe more, but I’m not. A clear test is to keep the white balance and when I surface take a shot and it should be very red in it’s color balance. It has not been red which tells me I did not really achieve a new balance underwater. What puzzles me the camera says it has completed its new balance.
I’m doing some pool test tomorrow and trying a new and larger white balancing card and I’m trying something unique . I’m using my unaltered color balanced images in Photo Shop. Picking the over all color cast and making a colored screen that I’m white balancing the camera to. I’m not sure this will work but who knows ?

Marc

[Tom Cuffari]

Well, I gave it my best shot. Let me know how your tests come out.

[Tom V]

As I understand it, shooting in the RAW mode does not involve any in-camera adjustments. Any particular white balance, color, tone or sharpness setting will not have any effect on the RAW file, as the data from the sensor is saved directly to the media without any processing by the camera. The Raw File Converter LE blindly converts the RAW files into sRGB.tifs without any user control. Raw File Converter EX allows the user to control and apply color balance, tone, sharpness(?), white balance, etc. in the computer rather than the camera. You can even make gigantic 72mb 16-bit AdobeRGB files for working on in Photoshop.

That is an impressive case. I hope you share a shot with us.