Lighting 101: Color of Light | Bergen County Photographer
Light travels through air molecules. These molecules scatter a portion of the light’s rays. As they scatter the color of light changes.
The color of light on a photograph provides clues to the viewers about the shot. Color can go a long way to affect the mood of the images.
We usually describe color basically by saying it is either cool or warm. Cool colors include green, blue and purple and warm colors are red, orange and yellow.
Cool light is perceived as calming but also cold or depressing, while warm light is perceived as comforting.
Color Temperature
If we heat something enough it will glow. Something that is totally black doesn’t glow at all.
When we light a match, for example, we don’t get a lot of warmth, however the match glows for a while. We measure those temperatures in Kelvin (K). Something that doesn’t glow at all is at 0 K. The glowing match is at around 1700 K, a basic household lamp is at around 3000 K. The other end of the Kelvin scale is related to a heavily overcast sky, everything looks quite cool with a temperature of around 10000 K.
There are five basic color temperatures for photographic purposes:
Incandescent……………………………………………………………………………………………..3000 K
Fluorescent…………………………………………………………………………………………………4200 K
Daylight/Flash…………………………………………………………………………………………….5500 K
Cloudy…………………………………………………………………………………………………………6000 K
Shade……………………………………………………………………………………………………….....8000 K
Five Basic color Temperatures