All right, were going to talk about camera calibration, calibration, not to be confused at calibration. Actually, it’s calibration and this is a concept that I don’t know, probably had thought some seminar somewhere or something but anyways it makes a lot of sense because it’s very close to a concept that’s been around for a long time very, very close to the zone system. And what it’s designed to do is to make you fully aware of what your camera and how your camera is behaving whether or not it’s actually recording accurately. In most cases, I guess is lowest ISO which is what I used in my studio but it applies to all ISO’s. And here’s how it works.

Basically, you want to get a gray card and a gray card is pretty much 50% gray, photograph it under an accurate light let’s say a strobe in your studio and get an accurate reading. And in this particular case here with my Nikon D1x which goes as low as 120 ISO, I got F11. That was my flash reading. I set up my soft box and I got a reading of F11 and I’ve fired it many times. I wanted to make sure it’s very consistent. I was getting F11 at 120 ISO and I took a picture of this gray card. And when I brought the gray card into Photoshop to the bottom right, you can see right here the levels of the histogram. And the histogram is telling me because all the information is off to the left of the middle and the middle is where it should be because it’s a 50% gray card, it’s telling me that my camera is under exposing.

So, what did I do then, I went back and I took another exposure. And this time, because my camera can’t go down less than a 120, I just took a meter reading at a 100. And whatever that aperture was, I adjusted accordingly which in this case means I’ll add more light and that would have been this result right here. And as you can tell the levels have moved over a little bit more almost to the middle were very, very close. But I’m going to try another one and this exactly what I did.

I photographed the third one at 80 ISO and I am pretty much in the middle. So, what is this telling me, for that camera with that lens, that tells me that my working ISO, the lowest ISO setting on the camera which is a 120, I should be setting the camera or adjusting my light for 80. My working exposure ISO should be 80 ISO and that way I will get more accurate exposures.

And exposures, an accurate exposure is very, very important when you’re trying to get good work float images. It’s actually a large part of the rule of thumb for success as well as getting good custom white balance or good white balance. You get those two working for you and your 99.99% of your battle is won.