Sunset light in the Vineyard (with request for advice)

I’ve posted quite a few photos of my dog recently, apologies for flooding the board with dog pictures but I have a question about handling WB in rapidly changing light.

I took these whilst out on a walk the other day. When I first arrived, the upper part of the vineyard was bathed in golden light just prior to the sunset. As I was there the sun was disappearing pretty quickly and the light was changing all the time.

My camera is a K5iis, all these were taken with the same lens, a Samsung 35mm f2. I don’t recall setting anything to do with the WB so it would probably have been on ‘default’ settings, whatever they are. I always shoot in raw and have never paid much attention to WB with the camera settings and was generally able to get the results I wanted in PP with minor adjustments. I use the raw files processed through Apple Photos btw.

The most satisfactory results with my limited knowledge of PP were to manually adjust in temperature/tint mode, generally sticking to similar settings around 4400K (and zero tint) for the first few and as far as I recall increasing the temperature a bit for the later ones as the most extreme golden light passed. I wanted to capture the tones as I recalled them (it was only a day or two ago!) and this was the simplest method I could find to do that. I tried picking a white spot but feel this made things look too cool and not how I recalled it.

I tried using the same WB settings for all but this also didn’t quite match my recollection of the reality, might be I just forgot how it really looked though!

Any suggestions?


Checking out the area by d00d0c, on Flickr


Brown eyed girl by d00d0c, on Flickr


Sunny face by d00d0c, on Flickr


Weather changing by d00d0c, on Flickr


Sunset reflected in eyes by d00d0c, on Flickr


Weinberg reflected in eye by d00d0c, on Flickr

You could try photographing a 'White Balance' card (typically a grey colour) sometime during the session and later use that to get an estimate of the colour temperture to apply to the RAW images from around the same time.

Cheers
Mike

I can't see any problem with the WB in any of the photos, but of course I wasn't there at the time and I'm not looking at them on your monitor. Yes, a white balance card will help give you the colour temperature at the time. However, from what you say it seems you want to reproduce what you perceived at the time. And the word 'perceived' is important. What you perceived depends on a lot of factors, reproducing it isn't just a matter of colour temperature. And then there is memory, what you remember might not actually be what you perceived at the time. My advice? Set the camera WB to 'Sun' then adjust colour temperature during post-processing until you are happy with what you see. Don't worry about whether it accurately reflects the light at the time, you're presumably doing it for fun rather than payment so all that matters is whether you like the final image .

No need to apologise for lots of dog pictures - a willing subject like that is a joy to see. My in-laws once had a dog that looked like yours. Lively and intelligent, could be a bit of a handful though, particularly if bored (the dog, not the in-laws :wink.

Steve

It depends on whether you want a neutral, accurate WB or whether you want to evoke a warmer or colder tone to your images. Generally, people prefer warm images, although it does depend very much on the intent of the photographer and the subject matter.

As I generally shoot JPEG images it's pretty simple to get any WB I want. If I was shooting a concert with stage lighting that contantly changes I would use AWB. For general daylight shooting I would use Daylight setting, and as the light changed I would leave it there and the different colours would be recorded as I saw them. If I wanted a warmer look (such as using film with an 81A filter) then I would set Cloudy. If I was deep in the shadows of the woods shooting fungi then setting Shade totally avoids any unfortunate purple shadwows creeping in.

Finally, if I am still wanting to tweak what I have shot, then Photoshop gives plenty of options.

Once again, my favourite simple, easy to use software lets me have whatever WB I want. Faststone Image Viewer has a neat set of sliders to control red green and blue. In fact, its only drawback is not supporting selections and layers - but it was never meant to be an all singing image editor. As it's free there is no excuse for not trying it !

Thanks for the suggestions, we‘re getting light like that most days at the moment so will come in useful.