‘Look,’ I said, proudly waving around the bundle at the missus. Inspired by strobist.com, I’d ordered myself a sample book of Lee’s color correction filters on the net, and completely forgotten about it. So, after a couple of weeks, when it was delivered to me, it was an awesomely pleasant experience and I felt like sharing my delight.
The missus immediately snatched the bundle from my hands, and gave it a thorough inspection, mentally scanning the repository of sarcastic comments she reserved for ‘look what my husband dragged in‘ kind of situations. But there couldn’t possibly have been much she could have said on this occasion. First, she had no idea what it was. Second, I’d not destroyed any of her ornaments or other stuff to make it (the incident involving my now defunct DIY soft-box using translucent cloth, held together with earrings still comes up every once in a while). I hadn’t been so proud of myself since quite sometime.
‘Wow, you must be very proud,’ she said, tossing the bundle back to me. ‘I don’t know of many people who have a collection of 1"x4" colored, semi-transparent paper.’ I felt like pointing out to her that the sample book had come completely free of charge, and all that I had to pay was INR 800 for the delivery, but I wasn’t certain that this too wouldn’t be twisted and turned into something that made me look bad. If ever I ended up murdering cute puppies, I would hire my wife as my lawyer. Am sure she’d have a way of making me look like the victim.
Here’s the thing. Apparently light has a temperature. ‘Hah!,’ you say. ‘Why on earth should I be bothered!’ Well yes, you shouldn’t. You see, this temperature bit is just a con, not unlike all the technical jargon that photographers keep blabbering about to make themselves feel important and purposeful. Everyone knows light has color, right? You switch on a tube-light – WHITE color. A bulb gives us YELLOW color. That concept is just too simple. Any idiot would understand that. So, instead of calling it color, why not just go around talking about temperature instead. And just to confuse the shit out of newbies like me, call it color temperature! Anyways, mercifully, we can get along pretty well without the jargon, thank you. All we need to know is this: Light has color. And, if there is a semi-transparent medium between the light source and the subject, the light would take on the color of the medium. Neat. But what is this medium? Well, it could really be anything that’s semi-transparent. A transparent plastic bottle of water, for example (as was the case with Charsi’s image on the left. Or a piece of colored glass. Or if you are friends with anyone from the United National Progressive Alliance of India, you could try placing his head in between (Caution: Vacuum is colorless). But there will come a time when you’ll run out of colored-semi-transparent stuff. That’s when you go here and order yourself a sample-book. What you get is a bundle of 1"x4" colored, translucent paper. They are called samples because that’s what they are supposed to be. They are like a shade card from a paint shop that you use to decide what shade of pink would go on the walls of your bedroom to go with the hot-pink curtains that your missus brought home. Only, in this case, you can actually use them. The size of the samples are just about enough for you to be able to cover the head of your flash. From thereon, you are only bound by your imagination. You can use them for some really nice effects. Coloring backgrounds, for example. Or adding a nice warm glow to your images.
But the primary use for gels is color correction. There are gels called CTO (which is a secret code for Color temperature Orange, but it’s much more intuitive to just pretend it stands for Change to Orange) and CTB (Change to Blue) that apparently every photographer should have inserted in tiny little capsules inside their mouth lest they get captured by the enemy. These gels help manipulate the light emitted by your flash to better match the ambient light, giving a more natural looking output. In most situations, you would want all your light sources (including ambient) to be of the same color, unless of course you are assisting Anurag Kashyap and going for the psychedelic-doped-out-of-body experience kind of mood lighting. If, for instance, you are shooting indoors, and your primary light is daylight through a window, while you are using a flash for filling the shadows, you would want your flash to have a CTB gel. Why? Because daylight is primarily blue, while the light being emitted by your flash is not. So, Change to Blue! If you are shooting with tungsten ambient light, you need to change the flash color to tungsten, or orange. So, you CTO. You get my drift.
As you can see, not only is this gel thingy pretty handy, it also comes pretty cheap. And having invested in all those fancy lighting equipment, you really need to ease your conscience, don’t you? So, go ahead and treat yourself to some cheap fun instead. The Canon EF 50-200mm lens can wait another couple of months.
Enjoy!
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Comments ( 1 Comment )
Crystal clear! Very easy to understand now! Thanks!!
Aditya Prabhu added these pithy words on
Jun 09 09 at
11:24 am
