Do you know what this is?

Yes, it's a piece of fruit. Do you know what it's called?  

It's also a photo prop. For one of my classes, I had to experiment with "white balance", which is basically how your camera perceives color temperature and tries to get it as natural as possible. You can let the "auto" setting do it, or you can set it manually. SLR or DSLR cameras have numerous manual white balance settings, and my practice exercise was to take pics of the same object, running through each of the settings in my camera (they can vary depending on the camera) to see the difference they make. I thought I'd share my results with you. Ha! You're getting a camera lesson whether you wanted it or not! ;)

Here's "Fine Weather":

"Cloudy":

"Incandescent":

"Flash":

The settings can make quite a difference, huh?

This last one is "Custom", for which I set my own white balance... and I won't bother you with how to do that... too long to explain here.

Here's the final "Custom" one I sent in for my class, taken in full manual mode:

In case you don't know, this is a lemon plum. I'd seen some in the grocery store a while back and decided to give them a try. They're imported from Chile and usually only available in February for a very short time. Once they ripen, they're supposed to be very sweet and juicy. I bought two of them. The first one took well over a week to ripen. Here it is next to the other one:

I ate the ripe one. I did find it to be tasty and very juicy, but the skin seemed pretty tart, just like a regular plum. The other one still hasn't ripened, and it's been about 2½ weeks! I have my doubts as to whether it'll make it. It's not looking too nice right now. Sorry, Grandpa... that one was gonna be yours.

Have any of you ever tried them? Did you think they were as good as the claims say?