Side Effects: Special Effects for Photographers

Photographer: Scott Kelby  Exposure: 1/400  Focal Length: 200mm  Aperture Value: ƒ/2

The name of this chapter comes from the 2009 movie short Side Effects (it’s less than 20 minutes long, which is probably why you can buy it for only $1.99 in the iTunes Store. It’s either that, or it’s so cheap because of its lack of zombies). Anyway, here’s how they describe Side Effects (say this in your best movie voice-over guy voice): “An ordinary guy becomes a human guinea pig in an experimental drug test and meets the girl of his dreams...” Sounds like a pretty typical everyday story. At least the human guinea pig in an experimental drug test part. Anyway, I looked at the movie poster, and the guys in the poster all have this creepy-looking bluish/green color cast that makes them look kind of sickly, but then the female lead’s photo looks fine, with regular-looking flesh tones, and that’s when I realized why this guy thinks he’s found the woman of his dreams. She doesn’t have a creepy bluish/green color cast. I mean, think about it. If all the girls around you had a serious white balance problem, and then all of sudden you meet a girl carrying around her own 18% gray card, and so she looks correctly color balanced in any lighting situation, wouldn’t you fall in love with her, too? Exactly. I’ll bet in the last 10 minutes of the movie, you find out that this guy actually starts an online business for people using dating sites like eHarmony, or Match.com, or HandsomeStalker.com, where he offers to remove bluish/green color casts from your profile photo for a price. Things are going pretty well for him for a while, but then in about the eighteenth minute, the experimental drug wears off, and he finds himself trapped in a dank, dimly-lit room, forced to write nonsensical chapter intros late into the night, until his wife comes in and says “Honey, come to bed,” but right then, he notices she has a bluish/green color cast, and....