Reducing night time orange glow
 

Hi All,

I am looking to get some filters for my Canon EOS 500D, but I am not sure which ones to get (nothing fancy or expensive as this is a part time hobby)

I am quite into my cars, and often and car meets, I do a lot of photography in public car parks, and being it this time of year, it is dark. The car parks are well lit, but when taking pictures with a slow exposure and tripod, there is always an orange glow from the street lights above

I would like to get a whiter finish to the photo i.e. a white light shining onto the cars rather than an orange one, if that makes sense. What filter do I need for this?

playing around with the amount of white and dark in the picture does not eradicate this, so I am thinking a filter would resolve this?

If anyone could help, that would be much appreciated

Hi - have at look at this web site. It will help you understand white balance :


http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...te-balance.htm

I was going to suggest playing around with the white balance too. I've recently put mine purposely to 'cloudy' in those types of situations to get more of an orange glow.
Hope it helps; no cost at all if it does!
Al.

Get an external flash with built-in diffuser and fire the flash 90 degrees towards the car and shooting on manual at 1/125 f/8.0 without using a tripod. Also to avoid camere shake set the shutter speed according to the lens. eg, if using a 500mm lens set the shutter speed 1/500 to avoid lens shaking.

Much depends on the light source. To start with I would set the auto white balance setting to Tungsten. That will reduce the red and add more blue to the jpeg image. If they are still too orange then use the K setting and use a figure of 2500 or less. ( remember to put back to auto otherwise your day light shots will be very blue )

If you shoot RAW you can use the DPP software supplied with the camera and use the temperature slider to adjust the colour balance setting on screen. Then save as jpg.

There are specialist narrowband filters to remove sodium light (as used in many street lights) sold for astronomy, but they would be hideously expensive in a size suitable for mounting on standard camera lenses & will probably give you other false colours for more normal photography. I doubt any other filter would be much good.

As the previous posters have mentioned the cameras white balance is the obvious way to go - If your camera has a custom white balance that would be the best option (these require you to take a photo of just something white - like the centre of a piece of plan paper - and allow the camera to correct for the local light). These days high pressure sodium lamps (& mercury lamps etc...) are becoming more common for street lighting which give a different bluer light to the very yellow older low pressure sodium lights. The local mix of these will have an effect on any of the predefined white balance settings on the camera.

Some software (such as ACDsee that I use most, & probably Photoshop etc...) have a colour cast feature which allow you to correct an overall colour shift such as this after the event. It requires you to select a point in the the image that should be a neutral grey or white. Results are usually fairly good - but getting the right white balance first is the better way to go if you can. This at least means you previous photos are not wasted, and gives you a chance of recovery when you forget to change back, or don't have time to change it...

Mike

thanks for the replies on this one guys

I have a canon EOS 500D, so I will play around with the white balance, as I normally do

stupidly enough, I didnt think to do this on the night! doh! oh well live and learn

I think the best tip is to shoot in RAW and then correct the white balance later, that way you don't have to experiment whilst you are shooting.

Photograph a sheet of white paper and then use that image to set the white balance.

Shoot in RAW and correct the white balance in PS, or try cooling filters in PS.