Quote:
Originally Posted by bibit612
I was reading up on night photography in the latest edition of Popular Photography. Supposedly there's that magic 15 minutes at sunset just before the sun goes down and its completely dark that is the best for night photography and bright lights. Being that the window of opportunity is short, you have to be quick. The author suggested setting your WB to tungsten. Somebody jump in here and stop me from making a fool of myself but it said something about the light being tungsten anyhow. kdog...what say you?
|
Hey Bibit, thanks for thinking of me. What you read makes sense, and is an interesting observation and idea. Tungsten is reddish and so is the alpenglow you get as the sun sets. By setting your white balance to tungsten, you should be able to offset the reddish tint of the alpenglow and get colors that are closer to what you would see in daylight. I don't know exactly how much of the red is will remove. The question you have to ask yourself is that really what you want? Do you want to correct the colors, or capture the reddish glow as you saw it. If you want to capture what you saw, then I might not use the tungsten setting. Or maybe the tungsten setting gives you a happy medium. Personally, being the anal retentive person that I am, I would go nuts trying to decide.
Fortunately, I don't need to make that decision, and neither do you. I'm going to take the opportunity to lobby once again that folks should shoot RAW. By shooting RAW you completely defer the color balance question to when you are actually processing the shot. You have a nice little temperature slider that you can adjust until you get exactly what you like. If you're still having problems deciding, process the shot both ways, and show other people and see which one they like. Furthermore, 20 years from now I might decide I don't like the color balance I chose way-back-when, so I can always go back to my RAW file and reprocess it at any color temperature I want. So forget about tungsten, and set your camera to RAW. Sorry you asked?
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
