Winter light

 

So much warmer and more color true than the sunset photos from earlier in the week!

So these are the pictures from Nora and I's Friday evening sunset ski.  I had been disappointed with the colors in sunset pictures from Wednesday.  They had almost completely failed to capture the gold color.  So on Friday I set the 'WB' or white balance setting on my camera to 'shade'.  And wow!  The colors were so much more accurate to what it was actually like up there.

After the ski I went home and read up on the pre set 'WB' settings on my camera.  At the bottom of this post is a re cap of that research and the photos I took on Saturday where I did some experimenting with the settings.

The pictures below are all from yesterday's ski in overcast conditions.  Back home I had researched 'white balance' settings on the internet and learned all about color temperature.  I even figured out how to manually set the color temperature for my camera.   So yesterday I took the same picture using different light settings (I also tried 'daylight' and as expected on an overcast day that was the absolute worst).  Below are the results.  

I also fully realize that I could just shoot in 'raw' and and figure out the white balance when I get home.  But I prefer jpegs - basically with jpegs the camera with my input decides how to process the data. I tell it what the light conditions are like and it uses my input to correctly interpret the light data hitting the camera sensor.  Jpegs are quicker (there is a reason that sports photographers and do not shoot in raw!), use up so much less memory on my computer hard drive, and, in my opinion, are more honest.  I am trying to adjust for the light while I am taking the pictures.  I am trying to match the colors and lighting at the moment rather than doing it by memory back home.  I also think that shooting jpegs is sort of like creating a 'negative' back in the old days.  Back in the days of film it was up to me to get all the settings just right when I was taking the picture because there was very little I could do back in the darkroom printing the pictures if the negative was no good.

Anyway, from now on I am going to pay much closer attention to the color temperature settings on my digital camera!

For this one I manually set the color temperature to 7200 K - to my eye it looked about right

For this one I used "AWB' - basically the auto setting

This one is set to the 'shade' setting I used for the sunset pictures above - it's pretty good!

This one is set to 'cloudy' and is awful - and it was a cloudy day!