86 Better Available Light Digital Photography
warming fi lter without the hassle, select White Balance in your
camera’s menus, then scroll through the available choices. On a
bright, sunny day, try using the Shade or Cloudy setting to warm
up the photograph. Experiment and check your results on the
camera’s LCD screen.AWB: color-temperature range of approximately
4000–8000 K
Our eyes are very good at judging what is really “white” under
different kinds of lighting conditions, but digital cameras need
processors to accomplish the same thing our brain does for
us. The camera’s AWB setting automatically interprets the
light within its range of parameters and adjusts accordingly.Adjusting White Balance settings
with the Pentax K100D series of
digital SLRs is easy: press the Fn
button, then the left-hand button
in the four-way controller to see
the preset White Balance settings
that are available.
What color is a sunset? You might
as well ask, “What’s a henway?”
(The Dumb & Dumber answer
is: “About 2^1 / 2 pounds”—although
poultry experts tell me 8 pounds is
more accurate.) Joe’s answer to the
sunset question is: “Whatever color
you like.” This unretouched photo-
graph of the beach in Acapulco was
made with a Leica D-Lux 2 digital
point-and-shoot camera that has
the ability to capture images in
HDTV’s 16 : 9 aspect ratio. Expo-
sure was 1/500 sec at f/4 in the
camera’s Landscape scene mode. ©
2005 Joe Farace.