I've got some exciting stuff to share with you soon: A ginormous giveaway & the big reveal of Penelope's & Felix's room. Their room is coming along quite nicely (well, that is if Penelope will ever stop destroying it long enough for me to clean it up & take pics of it). I'm also excited to share with you my new toy: White BAlens Lens Cap. This (besides my wireless remote), might be my favorite camera gadget so far.

I took 5 minutes to find this white balance in Kelvin. BAlens did it in 10 seconds.

I've never been happy with the white balance presets that any of my Nikons have had to offer & the auto can get so frustrating when in mid-shoot you have different color corrections. It's especially annoying when batching photos to find the colors all over the map! Seriously, I've spent hours editing poorly exposed/balanced photos before. It's misery. Almost exactly two years ago I took Nicole's table top class, where she emphasized heavily on shooting in manual & mentioned manual white balance. Since then, I've gone completely manual when shooting and I've been using my Kelvin setting for white balance. I've been using that for the last 1+ years and it's MUCH more consistent than relying on presets. I'm sort of getting the hang of it, but I'm nowhere near consistent enough; especially when in dark situations with multiple light sources.

I forgot to adjust my white balance from earlier in the day. BAlens fixed that.

 This little lens cap has seriously solved all of my problems. Not kidding. You can see a huge difference in these photos, right? I sure do. No matter what, the BAlens is going to be consistent. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Unlike a greycard. It's also pretty seamless to use this while capturing fleeting moments. The lens cap is always with you - as long as you have your lens that you bought the cap for, at least . You just turn on your camera, follow your white balance preset instructions & take a picture with your cap on. Then you take the cap off & shoot away. It's genius.

This is close, but still too orange/red.

I love that I don't have to worry or guess anymore to find the correct color balance in low/artificial light settings. No matter the light source, this thing helps my camera properly adjust for the lighting & gives me perfect skin tones every time. That's huge. I hate it when my pictures make me look like Snooky. Since using the BAlens cap, I've cut down on  my photoshop time by 90%. No joke. SO worth the $45-65 price. This is the least amount of time I've spent in photoshop since I started blogging. I have better things to do with my time - like nap with my kids. Or actually do the laundry. What's your favorite photography gadget? BAlens provided by Photojojo - THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!