Color Photography Q & A

The following is  an e-mail that was sent to the the group list of  my current Color Photography class.

The questions are in normal type, my answers are in bold.

On Mar 12, 2009, at 9:49 PM, ******** wrote:

“Thanks Sam.

Okay, so I’m chilling in my room going over some notes from last night. I pick up my camera and aim it at my subject beside my incandescent light source. I meter and fire off a shot using a incandescent WB. Everything appears all right. So now, I go to test out the Daylight WB using the same light source and same metering. I fire another shot and it’s a much warmer color.

That’s how it should be.

I try again but this time with Shade WB.

Since this white balance choice is a higher kelvin temperature than daylight, all other things being equal, this should have rendered the scene ‘”warmer/redder” than the previous WB choice of daylight.

Maybe I misunderstood yesterday and I got it backwards but I thought the idea went like this: If you take an exposure using a WB camera setting that is warmer (Higher Kelvin) than the light source should be Bluer. If you take an exposure using a WB camera setting that is cooler (Lower Kelvin) than the light source should be Redder.

You got it backwards.

Warmer does not = Higher Kelvin. Warmer = Redder = Lower kelvin AND Cooler does not = Lower Kelvin. Cooler = Bluer = Higher Kelvin.

In terms of the color temperature of the light source, it is what it is. Any color cast comes from the relationship between the White Balance setting (Kelvin/Color temperature) on your camera and the color temperature of the light source; Where do they lie in relationship to one another on the Kelvin scale? Don’t answer online. Just observe. We’ll talk more in class

Here’s a synopsis:

Light Source— Approximately 3200K

Daylight White Balance— Approximately 5200K

Shade White Balance— Approximately 7000K

Can someone shed some light on this for me?

Good pun *****.

In the meantime, I’ll try out a few more experiments.

Thanks, *******”

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 am. It is filed under Learn Photography and tagged with Color, color cast, color temperature, Kelvin temperature, light, photography, white balance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.