I received another photo from a friend to evaluate here. Here are his comments on his photo:
This was a 9 second exposure using my tripod. I was originally intending to get the cars on the outside road shooting from inside my complex, but when I saw a car coming down the driveway from inside our complex I quickly hit the shutter release. I was using a wider aperture so as to get stuff in the background more in focus, and in that sense it worked although do you think it would have been better if I had left it out of focus? Anyways, I really liked the way the taillights have a sweeping fiery pattern.
Before I can mention anything else about the photo, I have to mention the one thing that sticks out the most: red. This is way too red, unless you have some point to make by having it red or in real life there are red lights all over the place. My guess is that the white balance setting on the camera is set for a different kind of light source.
And I cannot help but throw in a shameless plug for taking photographs in a raw format. I know my friend, who shot this, primarily shoots JPG, and color can be quite a pain to get back to where it should be. If this was shot in a raw photo format, it would be a simple fix to bring the white balance back to a more realistic spot.
And speaking of balancing color in night motion photography, I saw a night shot recently that really stunned me. Something about the color really leaped out and made me stare at it for a while. It was not an incredible photograph necessarily, but the variety of colors really gave it a nice touch. I would like to see that in the photograph above.
One more thing: my friend said that he used a “wider aperture” in order to get more things in the background in focus. I am guessing he just used the wrong word on accident. This is an age old problem of terminology with camera aperture. A wide open f/stop will have a smaller number, because it is really an inverse fraction. We speak of “F 16” (not the jet, mind you), but that is written ‘f/16’. And looking at that lets you know it is a fraction. So, f/2 would be larger value than f/16. If you eat 1/16th of my food, I will not even blink. If you eat half of it, I might start to growl.
Anyway, I will assume that my friend accually meant to say a smaller f/stop (a higher number), which would indeed make more of the photograph in focus. With a night motion shot—well, I guess with just about any motion shot, night or not—I would certainly tend to move to the smaller f/stops. Since the object is moving and I want all that motion (all that blur) to be in the focus area, I will get the best results with f/16 or f/22, or some other small f/stop.
Yeah… I routinely forget to switch to incandescent or fluorescent for night lights shots. I was thinking about the red for a bit though and this is what I thought: I agree with you that this photo is too red, but look at the picture of the blurry trees I sent you. Do you think that one is too red? Since reading this, I’ve gone back and shot those trees (they’re really close to my house and the same every night) again in other WB but I still liked that red one the best! When using different WB to make the shot look more realistic or not as red, it made the shot look to white and boring. I think the red was beneficial in that shot. Would you say using the “incorrect” (note the quotes there) WB sometimes enhances the shot?
haha… yes I shouldn’t have said “wider aperture”.
Hey, that’s my night shot that you referenced! Thanks for the link… Glad _someone_ is checking out my photoblog.
Regarding the topic of raw format, that is exactly how I balanced the color of that photo. The sodium vapor lamps in the streets throw that orange-ish cast. I set the white balance on the camera appropriately, but that didn’t seem enough, so I removed the rest of the cast in post-processing. It couldn’t have been done if I had made the shot in JPG.
Too true. I tried to alter the JPG shown above to show as an example, but never could do much with it. I am sure it is possible to alter a JPG’s colors back to where they should be, but it is a massive amount of trouble, and who knows how much noise and grain you will introduce in the process.
If shot in a raw format, though, it is only one small adjustment to the color temperature: no noise, still perfectly clear.
Trajan, as to your question about incorrect and correct white balance, you are hitting on another topic: art versus reality. I regularly use the color, whether achieved with white balance or in some other way, to portray some artistic point, and when dealing in those realms, there is no longer any right and wrong.
Still, though, there are aspects of these photos that would make them more visually appealing, more striking, more intriguing, or whatever point you are trying to make. For instance, there is also a lack of contrast: the whites are pink and blacks are dark red.
Anyway, I would keep experimenting. Use the colors to your advantage, but also experiment with other settings to see what you can create and what you like the best.
Yes, you’re right about the lack of contrast. Everything is redder, not just the trees, which is where I like the red in that case. From an artistic view, how could I get red tree and not red other stuff in the picture?
I would try some creative lighting if I were you. Remember how I accidentally turned the picture of the tea roasting red by bouncing the flash off (or through) my hand?
Well, you could try using your hand(s) to bounce the flash. Or maybe you could shoot the flash through something red? Both of those options would red light the close stuff, and using a slower shutter speed could bring out the color in the background.
Ooo, another idea: light painting. Shoot a long exposure and use a little red flashlight (clear food wrap over a flashlight with the wrap made red with a marker) to “paint” or “color” the tree. These kinds of shots can look really cool!
Those are just some fun ideas.
Ah yes! Flashlights! I used the light painting method in my room at night and that was cool, but I didn’t really think of using outside like that! I’ll try out those sometime!
Oh yes, another question that regards White Balance. If you shoot RAW and load them into a program to change WB, does these kind of programs have more range on how to change WB than the camera itself? Do you do white balance by temperature in these programs?
Do they have more control? Hmph! They have WAY more control. You could easily take a photo shot in one white balance setting and switch it to another (e.g. “sunlight” to “shade”), but that is not the question.
At the moment, I shoot everything in “auto”, and once I see it in the program, if it looks off I will manually grab the slider (I do not know how other programs work, but UFRaw has a little slider to change this) and see where it looks better, more accurate, or whatever. Not that you could see the difference, but you could change the white balance one degree at a time if you wanted to! I usually use the little up/down buttons, which change the temperature in 50 degree increments to find the final setting.
My camera, the Nikon D100, seems to shoot a little cool in sunlight situations. I do not know what other people have noticed. And for the incredibly picky folks out there, I have noticed that some of the newer cameras have a function to set white balance by temperature Kelvin, which would probably be way too high-faloot’n for most of us.
Basically, this is a choice of how you process photos. If you want to take them accurate and not mess with them in post-processing, use the preset (“PRE”) option in your camera. Look in your instruction manual and learn the best way to set that. I have heard of folks carrying around a coffee filter as their white/gray surface to set their white balance preset. If you really want the best way to preset your white balance, you could buy an ExpoDisc…but they ain’t cheap as a coffee filter!
Haha… my instruction manual is in Chinese. And I don’t think my Chinese is that photography specific.
I guess I’ll have to see if I can download a D40 instruction manual off the web.
I just happened to download my D100 manual a few days ago, but the D40 and newer cameras did not have the same links as my older D100 product page. I did a little looking and found this where you can download a D40 manual