GX200 Digital Filters

^One of the special things about Hong Kong is that you can see lots of tropical cyclones, or locally known as typhoons, in the summer season here. In the urban areas, however, the buildings are so packed that the real strength of the rainstorms and winds is not fully felt. One has to travel to the less developed but equally accessible countryside to get the real taste. So there are places for both laid-back photographers and the more adventruous ones in photographing the inclement weather.

Further to the mentioning of the magenta cast on the photo yesterday, here are another example. The shot was taken in the morning where a tropical cyclone had just landed on Mainland China. I was strolling along the beach aimlessly, admiring the clouds being stirred in the sky. It was a bit rainy but the sun managed to shine between the clouds. The clouds were so dramatic to my eye that I decided to take a shot.

First I took the shot below, reviewed it and found something wrong. The image showed a rather sunny day because it caught the occassional sunshine. Hoping to faithfully represent the weather of the time, I closed the aperture a bit and use the GX200's white balance correction function, aka by me the digital filters. I moved the cross on the LCD screen to the magenta area to add the same cast to the shot, which is the first picture of this post.

The magenta filter is preferred for dusk shots to add a nice pinkish or purplish tinge to the sky. Here the pinkish tinge dramatises the scene, especially the clouds. Now the shot reproduces the scene as it was.

For those of you who don't own a GX200, or those who own one but haven't tried the extremely user-friendly digital filter function, you have missed a big joy. Try it out yourselves and make your own experiments plus conclusions. As far as I'm concerned, it is ace.