D7000 White Balance Help: Natural Light

I have a Nikon D7000 with a Tokina 10-17mm. I've experimented with different white balance techniques, and have not found any one solution that I'm happy with. I've shot with and without Magic filters, white balancing at depth. The Magic filters work quite well for 40 feet and shallower (in clear Caribbean water with +100 ft. viz), but I will also be shooting as deep as 100 feet. I know I can't expect great natural light color at that depth, but the DSLR white balance is far less attractive than my Sony HDR-HC9 video camera––my blues turn quite muddy/purple rather quickly. I've also found that the need to increase the ISO for such depths results in very noisy video. I would greatly appreciate any tips or tricks you may have discovered to achieve good white balance with pleasing blues, or any other suggested video settings for D7000 video.

I've also tried setting the Picture Control to either Landscape or Vivid, which increases the contrast and saturation of the video, and helps the blues out a bit, but seems to increase the amount of noise (especially in Vivid).

Many thanks.

I haven't tried it yet but this works with my wife's video camera. She gets purple water too and I think the camera is trying too hard to put some red in the photo. We found somewhere here on Wetpixel that the camera needs tricked into the right white balance. She does this by shining a light on a brown or red sponge and white balances off from that, it takes her a few attempts to get it right but it works. She does all this without her red filter which seams to defy all logic but it works.You would have to try it then take a picture and review what you get and try again with more or less light.

I don't know if this will work on a DSLR or not but I am going to try it on some shipwrecks here in the Great Lakes this summer.

I assume you are shooting RAW? You would have a larger range of White Balance adjustments in post.

I haven't tried it yet but this works with my wife's video camera. She gets purple water too and I think the camera is trying too hard to put some red in the photo. We found somewhere here on Wetpixel that the camera needs tricked into the right white balance. She does this by shining a light on a brown or red sponge and white balances off from that, it takes her a few attempts to get it right but it works. She does all this without her red filter which seams to defy all logic but it works.You would have to try it then take a picture and review what you get and try again with more or less light.

 

I don't know if this will work on a DSLR or not but I am going to try it on some shipwrecks here in the Great Lakes this summer.

 

I assume you are shooting RAW? You would have a larger range of White Balance adjustments in post.

Thanks Paul,

I'll give it a try. I do always shoot in RAW, but my concern is for white-balancing for DSLR video. In shooting stills, my results with Magic filters are great, but I've been having difficulty producing the same results shooting video, especially when diving deeper than the optimal depth for filter shooting... I've found DSLR video far more difficult to adjust in post than footage from my mini-dv video camera.

I've only shot one video so far on our Nikon D7000 (also using the Tokina 10-17mm) that contains footage down to 100':

[vimeohd]36954193[/vimeohd]

I manually WBed a few times when changing depth (against some wetnotes a friend held open). Otherwise, my settings were: 1080p, 24FPS, 1/50 shutter, f/3.5-5.6 aperture, ISO 400-800. I have a pair of video lights mounted to the rig as well. I was pretty happy with the background color, and the noise isn't excessive, though certainly noticeable during the deeper portions of the dive.

On the few other videos I've shot, I've been fairly shallow (~25' max) and had been able to rely mostly on ambient light, just using the video lights for fill. Here's the first video we shot (using mostly the same settings as above, except it was all shot at ISO 100):

[vimeohd]32901420[/vimeohd]

Neither video has any post-processing.

I have not shot any video yet with my D7000, I don't know anything about video for it yet. I would be curious what you find that works.

Rainer, thank you very much, great footage! I tried it out yesterday, with the addition of Magic Filters, and all seemed to work pretty well. Frustrating that the D7000 doesn't let you change aperture while in LiveView mode... very frustrating. I relied mostly on changing ISO for quick exposure adjustments. I also shot with the Picture Control on Landscape for added contrast and saturation, although at times the contrast appeared too intense. I'll try to post a sample shortly...