WB and night photography

hashcake

hashcake

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On a recent photowalk of London at night, one of the other photographers set her cameras WB to tungsten when we were taking photos such as those looking down the thames from the Millenium bridge.
When I got home and loaded my shots into lightroom I changed a few to tungsted and was impressed, although I have since discovered that the colours do need warming.
After reading an article in photplus, it was suggested that tungsten is the best option for these conditions.

So my question is which WB settings do you use for night shots when there is a lof artifical lighting and why?
 
I think tungsten wouldn't be a bad setting for night street shots - better than daylight for sure.

But I think you have to be careful and not get too carried away with getting it 'right'. Sometimes wrong looks better. You wouldn't want to take the red and orange out of a sunset, and pictures lit by an open fire wouldn't look too good is they were all corrected, or a photo of someone blowing out candles on a cake. Those sort of things look right when they're maybe technically wrong.

What is right and wrong anyway here? The colour of any subject is the colour of the light reflected from it. If that is red or yellow or green, then that is surely right? Depends what looks best.
 
Fluorescent may work too. Probably depends on the street lamps.
If you shoot RAW you can change the WB later and pic what effect you like most.
 
Different street lamps have different degrees of glow to them so I just shoot RAW with white balance set to Kelvin and correct it in post. Tungsten usually works a starting point though!
 
sodium lights are around 2000k aren't they? If may be worth using custom WB if you've got sodium lights...
 
I like to think of White Balance as ultimately, one of the most creative tweakable tools we have for our raw files. Forget what is "right", and instead focus on what looks "best". I like to set my white balance at times to some incredabely unnatural colours, and whilst a lot of people think it's OTT, a lot of people seem to love it too.

I would rather a nice deep blue sky over a city at night, especially if the alternative is that horrible orange glow.

Gary.
 
Good point, I think often the best results come from breaking the rules. I just like to know what the rules are first! ;)
 
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