Pixiq

When working under all kinds of weird lighting conditions, one of the biggest advantages of digital capture instead of film is that you can and capture color correct images without using on-camera filters.

For many digital SLR owners, the temptation is to set the camera on Auto White Balance and blast away and most of the times that’s not a bad approach. Other times I hear people say, “I’ll fix it later in Photoshop” but my answer is why waste time when you can capture it correctly in the first place. If you’re wondering how, here are a few suggestions:

The camera’s Tungsten setting is amazing; it’s like loading a film camera with Tungsten color slide film or a forgiving color negative film, such as Fuji 800. When shooting under typical living room incandescent lamps you may want to shoot a few test shots to see if you have to increase exposure but the color balance should be right on. You can also use it outdoors with a filtered flash to create a special effect.

Of the many impacts that digital imaging can have on the kind of pictures you make, the biggest must be on low light photography. Unlike shooting film, the LCD screen on the camera’s back provides instant feedback allowing you not only to make exposure changes but also tweak depth-of-field to get just what you want as well as color balance, with no filters required.

When working under low-light conditions, Some things won’t change: Slow shutter speeds means you need a sturdy tripod and more often than not, shooting in little or no light means an increase in ISO speeds. With imaging sensors, a combination of slow shutter speeds and high ISO spells: N-O-I-S-E. OK, traditional photographers have to cope with grain from higher ISO film too, so the trade-off between working with the two media ain’t all that different.

Some digital SLRs let you set specific color temperature in degrees Kelvin. At a fire truck factory in Colorado where I was shooting, the color temperature would vary 500-1000 degrees Kelvin depending on where I was standing in the vehicle assembly building. The large colorful vehicles parked all around tossed additional color pollution. Who are you gonna call? A color teemperature meter,  that’s who.

You place the color temperature meter in the same position that you would for making an incident light meter reading, push the button and it displays the color temperature in degrees Kelvin. No translation necessary; it doesn’t get much simpler than that. In the old days, I would need to have translated that into a color correction filter, screwed it onto the camera (lost exposure due to the inevitable filter factor) and hope for the best. With a digital SLR you can see it now and even makes tweaks to color balance if the camera has built-in color balance bracketing is a trend today with many SLRs from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, and Pentax.