Experiment with the Wrong White Balance

One of the technical features that I like most about digital cameras is the ability they give you to match the sensor's color response to the color of the existing light using the white balance control. In the old (i.e. film) days, if you wanted to match a film to the light source you either had to choose a film that was balanced for that type of lighting (daylight film for daylight, tungsten film for tungsten, etc.) or use filters to "correct" the film for the existing light. With digital cameras, of course, you just open up a menu and tell it what the predominant light source is and shoot--and you can even fine-tune the response via a color-picker/color-temperature chart on with most DSLR cameras.

But you don't always have to choose the correct white balance. In fact, sometimes you get a more pleasing or more creative photo if you intentionally use the wrong white balance. If you use the tungsten setting in a daylight scene (as I did for the shot above), for example, you end up with a photo this unnaturally blue. Why? Because in order to balance the sensor's response to tungsten light, which is naturally very red because it has a warmer color temperature than, say, daylight, it adds additional blue to the scene. But if you use that extra blue in daylight scenes, you end up with photos that have a very cool twilight appearance. That is exactly what I did to get the shot of the Christmas tree on my front lawn. I did shoot the photo at twilight and there is some artificial lighting (LED) but the predominant light is just daylight. I exaggerated its blue color by choosing a tungsten white balance--which, in effect, put a blue filter over the image.

You can do the opposite, too (and I often do). If you are shooting on a very cloudy day where the daylight has a lot of blue in it, you can use a "cloudy day" white balance setting to add warmth to a scene--that's what that setting is for. But you can also use the cloudy day setting (again, it's designed to add warmth) on a bright sunny day and that in turn will add extra warmth to portraits, landscapes, etc. In fact, I almost always use the cloudy-day setting--it is almost my default white balance setting for outdoor scenes because I like them warm.

Of course, the simplest way to tweak the white balance in all of your shots is to shoot in RAW and then adjust the white balance after the fact. The Adobe RAW converter, for example, has a white balance slider that essentially lets you make your white balance choices after the shot was made.

Crank Up the ISO for Night Shots

For those of you who don't live in New England (or watch TV news) we had a bit of a blizzard here this past weekend. Considering that nothing (at least nothing I know about yet) blew off my house and the snow was powdery and easy to shovel, it was actually kind of a fun storm. The wind howled mercilessly and at times I thought the entire house was going to get lifted off its foundations and dropped in a snowy Oz. It didn't.

It was too cold and windy to go out shooting the day after the storm, but by that night I was really restless to shoot some pictures. I noticed the little spiral tree on my front lawn looked pretty from my office window (on the second floor), so opened the window and tried to get a shot. There was a small bookcase in the way, so I couldn't get a tripod close enough to the window to frame the shot I wanted. There was also a roof overhang in the way, so I actually had to lean out of the window (keep in mind it was about 15 degrees out and the wind was still howling) to get this shot using a 70-300mm Nikkor zoom on my D90 body. But the only light was from the tree and so, without a tripod to steady the camera (the lens has no image stabilization), I had to use the max ISO of 3200. I have rarely had to use that speed before, so it seemed like a good experiment anyway. But even at that top ISO speed, I had to shoot at a shutter speed of 1/60 second (at f/4). And trust me, steadying the camera on a snowy window sill with the wind hitting me at 40 mph was still an adventure. Luckily I don't think any neighbors were watching in the middle of the night.

I think the quality of the shot is pretty good considering the high ISO. I can see noise pretty obviously in the snow at the bottom of the frame, but it's not a distraction. And the colors in the lights themselves are pretty true to their real colors. So, while I would probably not use such a high speed as my first option, when the situation calls for it, it's nice to know I can go there. Of course, some cameras claim a top ISO of 100,000 these days (for shooting what exactly--bats in a cave at midnight?), but 3,200 did a good job here. The next evening I went outside and shot the same tree (from street level) on a tripod at ISO 200 and that shot is posted below--you can tell me if you see much of a quality difference. (It is better, no question--but the question is: by how much?) I'm going back out tonight to shoot it from the street with a longer lens--I'll play some more then!