Fiddler on the Roof

Ok, so it's a bad joke. "Sunrise, Sunset" is the name of one of the songs in the musical "Fiddler on the Roof", one of the classics and one where I still know most of the music despite never having actually seen it on stage, only on film.

What's that have to do with photography? Nothing, except that today's post is a short and sweet one about sunrises and sunsets. These shots are all about playing with the White Balance setting on the camera to enhance the colors rendered by the camera. Facebook friends have already seen them.

The sunrises are first (well, duh) and were shot with the camera set for a standard, cloudy white balance. For these shots, I had to boost blacks and highlights to improve the contrast, and boost the saturation of the reds and yellows just slightly (all in Lightroom). With a little more time to fiddle with the camera, I probably could have gotten closer to this directly out of the camera but I was trying to snatch the photo in the 3 minutes where the light was just right.

20mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 1/25 © Richard Critz

20mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 1/80 © Richard Critz

For the sunset scenes, I experimented with all manner of fluorescent white balance settings. I ended up using a base setting of "cool white" and then tweaked it towards the warmer colors with the "variation control". I have no idea what the correct Nikon name for that is but it's the ability to tweak exactly where the neutral gray falls in the range. For Lightroom post-processing, I increased the vibrance a tad on this first shot:

48mm, ISO 200, f/4.5, 1/160 © Richard Critz

For the final two shots, the only post-processing was to boost the exposure just a tad to brighten the overall image.

22mm, ISO 200, f/4.5, 1/40 © Richard Critz

22mm, ISO 200, f/4.5, 1/40 © Richard Critz

Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the days...