Lots of yellow

[ewx]

I got my 135mm lens back, now with working autofocus, so I had to take lots of pictures with it. Total cost was £154, of which £10 was paid up front to get a quote. The whole process took about a month and a half; I just took it to Campkins and they sent it Canon. I like this approach because I didn't have to mess around with packaging, couriers etc, and would use Campkins again for it as they gave a good explanation when it turned out to be taking longer than expected; gave an accurate estimate of when it would finally be back; and called back when they said they would.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

No filters. The white background to the cactus really is white, it's the fridge. The yellow backgrounds are the walls of my living room, which are a rich and cheerful yellow.

I guess your question is why is there so much apparent variation in the background yellow...

In most cases the flash was bounced off the ceiling rather than pointed directly at the subject. In some cases some of the light is likely to have reflected off nearby walls too. The same applies to the background, but differently than to the subject since it's not in exactly the same place.

The important point is that the subject and background in each photo weren't (necessarily) under identical lighting conditions.

In software I corrected the color of each image to true the colors of the subjects. So the variation in light hitting the subject is canceled out, but its inverse is then applied to the background.

Color correction is a normal part of developing an image and most cameras can automate this to some extent and have settings to let the user help out. You can generally do a better job in software though, if you're willing to put in a little extra time, since you know what's supposed to be white and the camera and computer generally do not.