Digital Focus: More on Tricky Lighting

Tips for photographing your kids' karate class and other tricky situations.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Photograph Your Kids' Karate Class

Digital cameras are perfect for capturing everyday events like after-school activities: gymnastics, karate class, kickboxing, ballet... whatever your family spends its time doing. All of those sorts of activities place great demands on your camera, though. By and large, they require action photography--something that digital cameras are notoriously bad at. And many of these functions take place inside gymnasiums, where the lighting isn't just bad, it's terrible. How can you get great pictures of your kids' next karate exhibition? This week we'll talk about the color adjustment issues--important if you're shooting in a gym--and next week we'll wrap up with some handy advice on getting action shots.

Dealing With Gym Lighting

Gyms use awful overhead lights that invariably create a greenish glow in digital photos. I don't know why, but the automatic white balance feature in most digital cameras simply can't handle gym lighting. Maybe it's all the undocumented asbestos in the ceiling. Whatever the reason, there are two things you can do to better balance the color in your digital photos.

Set the White Balance. First, manually set the white balance when you arrive. To do that, you'll need a camera that lets you manually measure ambient lighting based on a sheet of white paper--check the user guide to be sure your camera can do that. When you arrive at the gym, ask someone to hold a sheet of white paper a few feet in front of you. Focus on the paper and then use the white balance meter to set the color balance (refer to your camera's manual to see how to do this).

Set the White Point. The second thing you can do--and this is often even more effective than setting the white balance--is to set the white point in your pictures after you get them home. For this, you'll need an advanced image editing program like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements.

In Elements, for instance, you'd open a picture and choose Enhance, Color, Color Cast. When you see the Color Cast Correction dialog box appear on screen, click on some part of the picture that's supposed to be white (but is not deeply in shadow): You should immediately see the colors snap into alignment. The greenish background will disappear, and the whole picture will look dramatically better. If you're happy, click OK. Otherwise, click elsewhere on the image until you find a good white point. You'll know you clicked on a bad pixel if your whole image suddenly turns pink.

Now that you know how to control the color in a gymnasium-based photo, it's time to move on to capturing the action. We'll cover that next week in this lesson's exciting conclusion. See you then!

Dave's Favorites: Show Pictures on TV With EFilm Picturevision

One of the most frequent questions in the Digital Focus mailbag is about television: How can you easily display slide shows on the small screen? Many cameras, of course, come with made-for-TV video output, and that's often a convenient solution. Microsoft's TV Photo Viewer is another good, inexpensive alternative, but it requires you to build your slide show on the PC and copy the images to floppy disk before showing them on the TV. Now there's a new alternative: the EFilm Picturevision from Delkin.

The Picturevision is a small box that plugs into your TV's video and audio jacks and has slots for all of the most common memory card formats: CompactFlash, Smart Media, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and Microdrive. Using it is a snap: Just insert a memory card packed with pictures, and your slide show starts playing.

In addition to controls on the Picturevision itself, Delkin includes a remote control that lets you zoom in and pan around images, pause the slide show, change the transition style, and view thumbnails. You can also rotate images that are sideways.

The Picturevision plays MP3 tunes and displays movie files as well as standard JPEGs. One of my biggest gripes with this device, however, is that I expected the MP3s to play as a soundtrack to the slides--but the Picturevision can't do two things at once. You can watch pictures or play MP3s, but not both at the same time. That seems like a missed opportunity.

I really like the Picturevision, though, because it lets you show images without any fiddling on the PC. Just remove the memory card from your camera and pop it into the Picturevision; it's that easy. Of course, you can always create your own custom slide show on the desktop by copying images to a card first.

I found the Picturevision for as little as $65 with the PCWorld.com Product Finder.

Q&A: Does Image Quality Affect Battery Life?

Do high-resolution or high-quality pictures use more battery power than low-res images? It seems that the batteries in my digital camera seem to run out very quickly, especially when I shoot with my camera's best-quality mode.

--Brian Williams, Orlando, Florida

Yes, image resolution does affect battery life; larger images take longer to write to your memory card, and that process consumes a lot of power. As a result, you generally can't take as many pictures at high resolution as you can if you shoot smaller pictures with fewer pixels. The difference can be dramatic: If you shoot VGA-quality images (640 by 480 pixels) you can take perhaps two or three times as many pictures as you can if you set your camera to its best 3-megapixel resolution.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "Fingers and Toes," by Judith Secco, Bantam, Connecticut

Judith writes that she used a Nikon D100 to take this photo of a baby's foot and fingers: "I've always been fascinated by little children's tiny hands and feet. I shot these little toes and fingers while this baby played on the floor. Then I cropped it to the composition that I wanted, changed the mode to black and white, and played around with it a bit more in Photoshop to come up with the final product."

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

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