 Tim Devick |
how do I shoot xmas lights to the correct colors? How do I shooot Christmas lights (using my digital camera) and get the correct colors? When I've shot Christmas lights before (using digital or film), the lights always come out kind of orange, rather than the actual color that my eye sees. I'm guessing that this is because the lights are not "daylight" color, but rather tungsten or something similar. Has anyone shot Christmas lights (outdoors, at night) with a digital camera and gotten the correct colors in the lights?
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John A. Lind |
Tim, The "orange" cast *is* what your eye sees, but your brain corrects it. Might seem like I'm nit-picking, but it's for good reason. One of the skills in working under non-daylight lighting conditions is learning how to "see" the nature and quality of the light without the brain correcting it. It isn't that difficult, but it does take consciously working at it for a while. My experience has been with film, with which there are two methods for doing Christmas lights . . . one is using filters to color balance the lighting to match the film type (usually daylight). This is difficult at best as the filters eat up light in a situation that already doesn't have that much to work with. The other is to use tungsten balanced film to take care of major color balance correction, and then have the rest done when it's printed. Christmas lights are even lower in color temperature than tungsten lamps for photography, but typically not that much lower, and it allows using all of the available light. You should be able to do the same with digital . . . if you cannot do white balancing beforehand, then set it up as "tungsten" and work with the images to tweak the color balance in afterward. BTW, don't expect much brightness out of blue light bulbs . . . or any color that requires a relatively high blue content. The tungsten filaments in low-wattage Christmas lights give off near zero blue compared to color near the other end of the spectrum (red/yellow). -- John
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