Hoping someone can help with this. We have a dSLR Olympus E500 with an Ikelite housing. We are getting awesome results from the camera and love the detail it gives, especially when a turtle swam right up to the camera in a recent trip to Rarotonga and started nibbling on the port However, we don't seem to be able to use the manual whitebalance - we try setting it on a white slate (at depths of 10m - 30m) but it keeps coming up with an error saying its unable to set the balance We end up putting it on the most red we can find in the auto settings and shooting from there. However pics need a one-touch on photoshop to get them looking right. Would obviously prefer not to have to do this if we can help it!
Does anyone out there have the same camera and does it allow you to set whitebalance manually - what are we doing wrong??
Hi!
... we don't seem to be able to use the manual whitebalance - we try setting it on a white slate (at depths of 10m - 30m) but it keeps coming up with an error saying its unable to set the balance ...
That's a problem you will experience with virtually any camera at a certain depth. The range for a WB is limited. If you exceed it the camera isn't able to lock on a setting anymore. The only way around this is to use a correction filter. The resulting color temperature then will be within the range and WB will work as experienced topside.
Helge ;-)=)
Thanks for your reply Helge.
I would have expected at 10m in clear Rarotonga water the camera would have been able to sucessfully set the white balance. Like I say, even when we set it to the most red the camera has the results still need a touch-up.
I've seen many other cameras that seem to cope better than ours and can use the manual white balance in depths of 20m or so in the Red Sea. Was wondering if it was us or just the camera?? Sounds like its the camera which is a bit dissappointing...
Cheers
Stonefish
Hi!
I've seen many other cameras that seem to cope better than ours and can use the manual white balance in depths of 20m or so in the Red Sea. Was wondering if it was us or just the camera?? Sounds like its the camera which is a bit dissappointing...
I'm not sure if a camera is really able to compensate a 20m depth color shift. I believe that the E-500 is just honest and tells you that it can't get a proper setting. Imagine you've got 12bit of resolution per channel. This allows for a certain range of loss-less compensation (for an 8 bit JPEG image). When the red channel drops very low you may compensate only by heavy amplification which would result in visible noise in the affected channel. A camera may allow this to satisfy the need for a way-off WB or to deny it because a WB can't be made within the evenly amplified range. It's a balance between image quality and care-free user experience. DSLRs tend to focus on image quality (at least those with sort of a professional ambition) while the P&S type of customer usually will tolerate the trade-off in image quality for the possibility of the shot alone. SLRs always have been cameras for people who (should) know what they're doing. That's what you have to pay for flexibility and the chance to produce better images.
I would recommend to use filters and WB or to shoot RAW to do the WB later on. When converting RAW you can do any WB you like and decide if the result is still acceptable for your reqquirements.
However, we don't seem to be able to use the manual whitebalance - we try setting it on a white slate (at depths of 10m - 30m) but it keeps coming up with an error saying its unable to set the balance 
