Recipe for warm sunset

[claudio rietti]

Any recipes for creating a nice warm sunset light coming through one bedroom window? I'm thinking Nan Goldin style orange, New York. CTO doesn't work for me.

[Jon Kukla]

First thing I'd advise is looking at the color of the room, especially if you can change it. This is crucial, especially when working with lighter walls, since it allows you to bias the color of the bounced light coming off the walls and will help with slightly coloring your lower midtones around that area.

 

As for the light itself, there are several things worth doing - getting a more powerful light than you'd normally use and dimming it down should warm the color temperature up. That alone is probably not quite what you're looking for, but there are many gels from straws and ambers to "cosmetic" and beyond.

 

Keep in mind that CTO shifts to 3400K, while CTS shifts to 3200K. I'd also look at some of the arc-lamp correction filters, as some of them have interesting combined color shifts which might do what you want when used with normal tungstens instead. I'm thinking LCT's, 232, and 236-238. If the window isn't too big, you might also want to experiment with using gold reflectors lit by lamps with particular gels (and not always the obvious ones).

 

If you want an overall color bias, then filtration options would probably include a light color FX - could be anything ranging from sepia or tobacco to cranberry. Also look at 812 filters and enhancing filters.

 

That's a lot of different options, and probably the best approach is to maybe lightly use two or three in combination. If it were up to me, I'd probably look at production design above all else, with filtration if I want an overall image shift or gels if I want it isolated to the light source.

 

Best of luck!

Edited February 10, 2007 by Jon Kukla

[Stuart Brereton]

Late afternoon sun in the northern hemisphere looks like 1/2 or full CTS to me. As the sun gets lower it's more like CTO. Maybe you could try something like Bastard Amber, if you don't like CTO.

[Matthew Buick]

Do you mind if I could ask what these CTSs and CTOs are?

 

Thanks.

[Jon Kukla]

CTO = Color Temperature Orange

CTS = Color Temperature Straw

 

These are specifically made gels which are designed to shift the color temperature of light towards a warmer (lower) color temperature.

 

Actually, looking at my first posting above, I realize I got my numbers mixed up. Both CTO and CTS convert daylight to 3200K - the difference is that straw also has an added yellow bias.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Do you mind if I could ask what these CTSs and CTOs are?

Color Temperature Straw and Color Temperature Orange. They're both orange looking, but CTS is more yellowish, and the CTO is more red.

 

Using a few different colors ranging from pink to orange can make a sunset/sunrise scene more interesting. Perhaps also filling the shadows with blue to emulate skylight would look good, but it depends on the mood you're trying to create.

 

Try to use what you've observed in real life to create, rather than looking for recipes. I've seen one sunset that lit a room an almost blood-red color (ironically, we were shooting a high-key day interior facing in the other direction at the time!).