Lake Tuz, Turkey

When Auto White Balance (AWB) does not work, photographers resort to manually setting White Balance. The procedure is simple enough: aim the camera at a white sheet of paper, take a color temperature reading and assign that to the color white, and shift all colors accordingly. But how do you do that for a satellite camera taking pictures of Earth?

It just happens that Lake Tuz in southern Turkey dries up in July and August, revealing a bright, pristine white field of salt. The lake’s whiteness is ideal for calibrating the white balance of the cameras on Earth observation satellites.

Lake Tuz is one of eight sites worldwide that can be used as an international reference standard to calibrate and validate satellites’ sensors.

[PopSci]

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Using High Dynamic Range (HDR) technique can dramatically improve your real estate photography. But how much is just right? This excellent video gives examples of the good, the bad and the ugly of HDR photography:

Notice how turning on the lights in the indoors shots make such a great difference.

After you’ve seen these without and with HDR images, don’t you want to take all your pictures with HDR from now on? Just make sure you don’t overdo it.

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Uzair Kharawala of SF Photo School has published at PhotographyBLOG an interesting tutorial about taking correctly color-balanced pictures in the extreme cold — an ice chapel in the Artic in this case.

Read the tutorial at: PhotographyBLOG.

Luminous Landscape has published a short but interesting post about the best White Balance to select for the effect you’re after.

You can read the whole article at: Luminous Landscape.

Perfect for Lunch Break Reading, here is how to set Custom White Balance on your digital camera so you can get real colors under artificial light.

[ Read the tutorial at: Photoxels on Facebook ]