Washington D.C. Night Photos Question

crodier66

I am going to Washington D.C to take night photos of the momuments. I am will using a Canon 7D and was wondering which White Balance setting to try? Tungsten light, White Fluoresent light, Auto or Customer?

Thanks,

Chris

Tinstafl

You could always shoot raw and can adjust the WB in post.

W.W. Webster

Tinstafl wrote: »

You could always shoot raw and can adjust the WB in post.

I can't understand why any photographer would ever do any different - whatever the time or place! Why 'guess' the WB ahead of time and lock that setting into your image files, when you can get it right in pp?

JimKarczewski

RAW, but in general shooting 3200 usually results in pretty good WB for night exposures. Unfortunately I don't have any of might night DC images available right now to tell you how I did them. That or hit a white monument first and custom WB off the white.... Cant' get any easier than that!

colourbox

crodier66 wrote: »

which White Balance setting to try? Tungsten light, White Fluoresent light, Auto or Customer?

I'm not sure what type of light is used to light up the monuments, but it is unlikely to be straight tungsten or fluorescent, it could be sodium vapor or even mixed lighting which means you'd still need to customize it at some point. And of course the best way to customize it is later, after shooting raw.

JimKarczewski wrote: »

hit a white monument first and custom WB off the white.... Cant' get any easier than that!

If you wanted to get it right in camera, that would be a good way to compensate for whatever lighting or mix of lighting they have.

With night shots, though, sometimes going for straight white looks fake or makes the rest of the image look fake or too blue. Often it seems like a good idea to get close to white in camera, then in post warm it up a little, and a lot of times that looks plausible.