Color temperature meter underwater

Anyone ever heard of using a color temperature meter underwater? Would an appropriately housed color temp meter make sense for still and / or video photographers?

I doubt it. Firstly, the only thing that it would be useful for would be measuring the colour temperature of continuous lighting and this will be constantly being modified depending on the light to subject to camera distance. Secondly, translating colour temperature to a value on the camera is, I strongly suspect, adding another variable as in my experience the colour temperatures recorded in the exif data rarely agrees with that which would be anticipated from the lighting being used. On stills cameras its easy enough to shoot raw and balance later unless a specific and constant colour differential between ambient and carried illumination is needed. On video you would need to be shooting very pre-determined shots with adjustments being made for each new shot and more than likely some CC filtration would be required too in order to retain precise and repetitive colour rendition - big budget shoots maybe, perhaps?

Anyone ever heard of using a color temperature meter underwater?

Yes, it is called Auto White Balance. It's built into my camera. It's not very good underwater.

Would an appropriately housed color temp meter make sense for still and / or video photographers?

For stills, no. First, what difference does it make if you are using flash? Second, what difference does it make if you are shooting raw? Third, it would have to be faster than setting white balance off a shot to be worthwhile. You would have to take a meter reading, then adjust K scale to meter. This isn't really any faster than taking a shot and telling the camera to use that shot for WB.

For video, the camera would need a way to enter a WB value. While this is possible on a DSLR, I'm not sure how many video camcorders allow this. I know the HC9 does not.

Thanks; just a thought, now laid to rest.

I believe that a housed color temperature meter would answer a some of the misunderstood aspects of white balance which is simply another name for color temperature.

One problem with using a DSLR camera for white balance readings is that the DSLR's have a reduced color temperature reading range compared with a meter. DSLR cameras cannot fully correct light near the 10,000 K maximum which they say they can correct. The same is true when you get very close to the warmest temperatures. And when you get color tempertures above 10,000 K, as you do underwater, the white balance is increasingly less adequate which is one of the reasons why filters like the magic filter are needed to do a large part of the correction.

The Kenko color temperature meter can read both ambient light and flash. When reading flash with the Kenko meter you can vary the "shutter speed" during a flash reading and get a combination of the ambient light + flash color temperature. This combination reading will get cooler and cooler as the proportion of ambient on the subject increases.

Fred