Help - what white balance setting?

[erick]

Tonight I want to shoot time lapse of the Leonids. I'll be photographing fairly dark sky, stars and hopefully lots of meteors (and probably wandering aircraft).

For my first attempts at timelapse, I left white balance on my Pentax K100D set to "Auto". This time I want to set it to another setting to prevent changes between shots. But which setting???

Here are the settings on the camera. Scratch out "Auto". I won't know enough to fiddle with "Manual". So which one should I set it to? "Tungsten"?

• Auto
• Daylight
• Shade
• Cloudy
• Fluorescent W
• Fluorescent N
• Fluorescent D
• Tungsten
• Flash
• Manual

Thanks in advance
Eric

[toryglen-boy]

Fella

Why do you want to change it?

just asking!

[asimov]

Shoot in RAW & take your pick after the shoot..

[erick]

Not sure that I can get the 580-600 shots I plan to take, stored as RAW on my 4G card, John? (Quick check - probably 6G+ - it took a while to get the K100D to recognise the 4G card - it might be OK with a larger one. Also write to card is about 2.5 times greater for RAW.)

Maybe white balance doesn't matter as much for shooting the stars. I certainly see people state that you will get changes between shots for well lit timelapse if you have Auto WB set.

[Octane]

Eric,

I don't think that's the case.

Stick to auto, as it's the best option.

Regards,
Humayun

[erick]

Auto it is, thanks guys!

But I will think about shooting in RAW, John! I'll pick up a bigger capacity card and experiment.

[asimov]

Hi Eric. Yes they are way cheaper than they used to be! The cards that is..

G'luck mate.

[erick]

8G Sandisk SDHC for $34.80 in Officeworks - I'll try to pick one up and see if the camera recognises it. :)

[RB]

Sorry but I disagree, Auto is not the best WB option at all !

As you've stated Eric, Auto WB will change between shots due to variations in conditions.
You do not want the camera choosing different Kelvin temps between each shot do you ??
The camera is easily fooled in these conditions.

The best option is to use Daylight WB and it's the logical one since it is the closest one to our own natural star, the sun, especially if shooting luna shots since the moon is reflecting sunlight.
The other settings (apart from cloudy and shade) are for man made light sources.

Choose either Daylight WB or set it specifically in manual and set the temp between 5000 K to 5600 K so that it will stay constant throughout the duration of your shot.

This applies if you're shooting jpgs.
If RAW then you can set your WB in post process, as Mr Asimov said :), again you can batch convert so that they are the same eg. Daylight or around 5k-5.6k Kelvin.

My advice is to shoot jpg's and use Daylight WB, Eric, if you can't fit RAWs on the card.
I always shoot in both RAW and jpg's (and use Daylight WB) but that's only for my convenience since I can fit them both on the 8GB card.
This means I can quickly view the jpg's and use the RAWs that I want but if I do a time-lapse I use the jpg's and batch resize them using VirtualDub down to a manageable size then go from there.

Just be sure not to apply any in cam picture styles as this will affect the jpgs (I'm not familiar with the Pentax camera picture options).

Good Luck.

[erick]

That all makes sense to me, Andrew.

OK, now I'm shooting JPEGs and setting Daylight WB. :D

[jjjnettie]

"Daylight" is best.

[TrevorW]

Some even recommend a custom white balance, thought I'd throw that in just to confuse you more

[erick]

:confused2: OK, I'm off to buy a pile of film for the KX! :D