Morning wildlife / white balance?

[AndrewWG]

So I have been running this through my mind (probably overthinking as usual) and was wondering what white balance would you use for morning shots of wildlife?

Here is the situation. I will be in the Everglades one early morning next week. If the weather cooperates, I should have nice early morning sun (you know, that nice warm glow?) and some FANTASTIC subjects to shoot. Now, should I just use auto white balance in this situation? Daylight? Should I bring a piece of white paper and do a custom WB? I was thinking the white piece of paper, however I am wondering if that would cancel out the nice warm glow of the morning light? I would think that the camera would "see" the nice warmly lit piece of paper as white and cause all of that nice warm glow to be whiter in the photos? I would think that I want to preserve that morning glow to some degree.

I know that I could just leave it on auto and change them all in photoshop/lightroom after the fact, but I would really like to get them as close to perfect in camera rather than spend time afterwards messing with that.

So confused...

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I was thinking the white piece of paper, however I am wondering if that would cancel out the nice warm glow of the morning light?

Yes, it would. The idea behind white balance is to capture the true color of subjects as they would look under neutral lighting. If you want to preserve the color of the light, you don't want to white balance it.

I usually use AWB and adjust the pictures as a group to match the look I want. Perhaps a better approach would be to fix the white balance to a particular color temperature (like 5600K). I'd like to hear what others do.

 

[MICKEY88]

I'd shoot raw& jpeg , and either auto white balance it or daylight since it is after all daylight.. just warmer with morning sun..

 

[jann1033]

i always use daylight as a few times when i 've used auto it has been a little off..but you can always adjust in pp if you need to. in my rebel xt daylight is 5200 K

i'm guessing the paper would cancel out the light just like setting the wb for snow via shooting a block of snow
cancels out the cool light.

 

[AndrewWG]

Thanks everyone!

You have confirmed what I thought. I will probably use the daylight setting and see what results I get and try to tweak it from there to minimize post processing as much as possible. I have Lightroom now so it isn't so hard to do. I am assuming that the white balance I choose for one will probably be the same for most of the shots at that particular time of day so I can do them all at once. I love that feature.

Thanks again.