Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Winter Photography Tip #8 – White balance

whitebal Winter Photography Tip #8   White balance

When you are photographing in snow conditions there are situations where you’ll need to adjust the white balance so that snow is white and so it doesn’t have a blue cast.

On the other hand the colourcast you get when you shoot in the early morning or at sunset is desirable so don’t remove it or your sunsets and sunrises will be ruined.

To capture the colour of the light set the camera’s white balance setting to sunny day – the camera makes almost no adjustment to white balance when you do this. This makes it a good setting to use when capturing sunsets, for example.

However, when there is a colour cast that you don’t want to capture such as blue light on snow, then adjust the white balance setting in your camera to remove it. To warm up an image, set the white balance to shade as this adds a pink/ orange warming cast to the image and counteracts the blue/colder light.

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

Camera Icon in Excel 2007

camera 777224 Camera Icon in Excel 2007

Hi Jim from Calgary!

Jim wrote and asked, “I’ve been using the camera icon for years and I can’t find it in Excel 2007. Can you see it anywhere?”

He also said, “nice blog thanks” – so anyone that nice deserves an answer.

So, Jim, don’t go looking for the camera on the Ribbon it isn’t there. You probably already know you can’t customize the Ribbon either so you can’t put it just anywhere you like – thanks Microsoft! You’re limited to the Quick Access toolbar – that little bar to the right of the Office button. Click the down arrow to its immediate right and choose More Commands. From the Choose Commands From list choose ‘Commands Not in the Ribbon’ (that’s how I figure it probably isn’t on the ribbon), and then locate the Camera. Click it and click Add. Then click Ok. Now the camera is on the Quick Access Toolbar and it works as it always used to – least so far as I can see.

If you’ve now got a great new camera icon on your toolbar but you don’t know what to do with it, then visit my Snap an Excel range blog entry to find out…

Sunday, April 1st, 2007

Snap an Excel range

camera 747313 Snap an Excel range

Did you know you can take a photo of an Excel range? Well you can and it’s one cool way to get around the problem of needing to print bits of two worksheets on the one piece of paper, something as smart as Excel is, it just can’t do.

To do this, right click a toolbar and choose Customize, Commands tab. From the Categories list choose Tools and from the Commands list click and drag the Camera icon up onto a toolbar. Now select a range on a worksheet and click the camera. Then click where the ‘photo’ should go.

Repeat this to assemble bits of lots of worksheets onto one page for printing. And the best bit? the photos are ‘live’ if the data in the worksheets changes, the photo does too!

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

Snap a range
It’s possible to take a picture of a range in Excel to insert into Word as a picture or to place as an image in another area on a workbook. To do this, first select the area to snap and hold Shift as you open the Edit menu. Choose Copy Picture, select As shown on screen or As shown when printed and click Ok.

You can now paste the image wherever you desire. This Shift + Edit menu option also works for copying a clip art or other type of image inserted into an Excel workbook.

Use this technique to print data from two Excel sheets on the one sheet of paper, something that’s notoriously difficult to do otherwise – regardless of the fact that it’s a feature we’d all love to have!