Going to the Dark Side

You know how I wanted to "capture reality." Then I wanted to document what I see. Then I messed with the exposure of an eagle, not to fix a mistake, but to make the picture more interesting. Now I've messed with the color (white balance) of a skink.

I try to set the camera's white balance so that it matches the type of light in the enclosure. Outside, it's pretty straightforward: Sun, shade, or cloudy. Inside the Reptile House at the Columbus Zoo it's not. Inside at home I'd choose incandescent. In the Reptile House, sometimes I can see a light fixture and tell that it's fluorescent. Sometimes there are multiple fixtures with different bulbs. A little red light is pretty common.

During my most recent trip, I'd pick a white balance, take a picture, compare the color in the photo with the exhibit, and repeat. I got tired of that pretty quickly and decided to stick with daylight and fix the pictures later. The camera has automatic white balance, but it didn't perform well. (A clue to me that the white balance is off is when the animal and the walls of its enclosure are about the same color.)

prehensile-tailed skink

I first brightened the skink. I had purposely underexposed many shots so that the ISO (light sensitivity) wouldn't be too high and cause graininess, so that was something I had to fix. I changed the white balance so that the skink looked reasonable, but green. Then I went to the dark side. I Googled the animal and learned that it's actually brown. It looked green in the exhibit, so I could have stopped where I was, because that was the reality I saw, but I kept fiddling until I got a brown skink.

I ended-up with a better picture, but I do NOT want to do this often. I came home from the trip with 275 pictures of reptiles and langurs, and I had to mess with a lot of them. Mostly, all I had to do was brighten them, but I can barely decide how much. One stop? 1.5? 2.0? I don't have the patience and I'm still not interested in learning to use the software effectively.

Obviously, my attitude could change.

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Not long after I more-or-less finished this page, the Columbus Zoo posted a photo of this skink. It was green.