Snapshot Saturday

I have been tweaking my little E-P2 a bit. I've set the color balance to a constant 5,400°K, turning off automatic white balance. I'd noticed that I was selecting daylight for a lot of my shots when post-processing in Lightroom 4, which was setting the white balance to 5,500°K. Olympus' Custom White Balance (CWB) will only allow changing the color balance in 200°K steps, so I set it to 5,400 and went on from there. If I need a different color temperature I set it explicitly, specifically for tungsten and fluorescent lighting, but otherwise I don't touch it at all. BTW, daylight color film is supposed to be color balanced for 5,500°K.

Today was very overcast with little showers when I photographed this phalaenopsis orchid. The drama came primarily from playing with the black slider in Lightroom 4 and adding vignetting. All that trouble to eliminate vignetting in the lens, and some yahoo goes and adds it back in again in post. Life just isn't fair.

My wife and I went out for a late lunch over near Mall of Millenia. On the way out to the Apple store I passed one of may overflowing trash containers. We produce so much waste for something as simple as eating, nearly all of it plastic or plastic-infused. And all that plastic petrocarbon-based. It's wind up in one of our landfills or possibly out in the Pacific Gyre garbage patch.

On the way through the center part of Millenia to the Apple store, my wife spied this gentleman with his brush apron getting a bite to eat. She thought it would make a great artist's brush apron for daughter #2 in Tallahassee, so she made a bee-line over to ask the guy if and where she could buy one. She quickly found out it could be purchased at the M.A.C. Cosmetics store. We went quickly to the Apple store where i picked up a GoFlex Pro portable drive. On the way back out we stopped at the M.A.C. Store for my wife to look for the apron.

It is, to say the least, unique. I am definitely too old and straight-laced and as a consequence felt like a fish riding a bicycle while waiting in the store. I tried to capture the environment with the E-P2 and the 20mm, but it was quite a challenge. The photo above had different color lighting all over the place, mixed from exterior and interior sources. I tried the best I could in post using Lightroom to find a reasonable balance between the two, but it still looks off. Very off. Color temperature was shifted down to 3400. If I used the white balance dropper on the left woman's white head scarf, color balance shifted even further down and left the entire photo too blue.

We did a little grocery shopping at the nearby Super Target. Right after that we stopped by a local $1 store so my wife could pick up some small items. Again, while killing time, I snapped these $1 artificial orchids.