92 Better Available Light Digital Photography
Mixed lighting outdoors presents
a fun situation in the digital world.
It’s time to experiment, trying dif-
ferent White Balance settings on
the camera. “Film is cheap” was
a buzz phrase back in the day,
referring to the low cost of making
a few more exposures in compari-
son to the photographer’s shoot-
ing fee. If fi lm is cheap, then
digital fi les are basically free!
Borrowing a trick from our archi-
tectural photography friends,
here’s one way to create an inter-
esting twilight image. The camera
White Balance is set to Tungsten,
correctly balancing the rodeo
arena lighting, which in turn
renders the evening sky a cool
blue. © 2005 Barry Staver.
This photograph is the second in a
series of studio shots of models
wearing corsets. Joe has been
making the series as a self-assign-
ment. Exposure was 1/15 sec at
f/13 at ISO 200. The photograph
was shot in Flash Color Balance,
but the gray background was too
warm blue. So, in order to produce
this image, he used PictoColor’s
iCorrect EditLab Pro. © 2007
Joe Farace.
Flash: approximately 5400 K
Light from electronic fl ash units tends to be cooler than daylight,
so you can use this setting to warm up your images. With some
digital SLRs, this setting is similar to Cloudy and some photogra-
phers use both settings as a form of digital warming fi lter for