What is Tungsten Lighting?

[Tickla]

My camera has a setting for this, but what excactly is Tungsten Lighting?

 

[boBQuincy]

Incandescent bulbs mostly use tungsten elements, thus the name. The color of the light is warm, much more red than the standard "daylight at Noon in Washington DC" that most cameras use as their "daylight" setting.
Because of this the tungsten bulbs will result in reddish photos, the tungsten setting attempts to correct the color shift.

 

[SharonLowe]

If you use the tungsten setting, it will result in your images having a cooler color. If you shoot fireworks or other images at night, this would be the best setting. Also, as the previous poster stated, if you are shooting indoors without a flash, you should use the tungsten setting.

 

[tinksdad]

What they said!!

You can use the white balance controls on the camera to do some interesting things. In conjunction with a flash, you can gel the flash with a CTO (color temperature orange) gel or filter which corrects the white light to match the tungsten color of the incandescent lighting. Change the the WB to Tungsten on the camera and shoot the subject. This will turn the background a interesting shade of blue.

Redtip Yucca blossoms at about 11am

 

[Groucho]

You'll want to use tungsten when shooting indoors under most normal lightbulbs. You'll know that you should use it when your photos have a yellow cast to them - you can demonstrate this by taking an indoor photo without the flash and one with, and you'll find that the flash photo will probably shows the whites as white, while without the flash, you'll have a lot of yellow.

Digital cameras are often pretty good at determining correct white balance expect for tungsten lighting.

Make sure to remember to set it back to auto before you start shooting outdoors again.

This can be adjusted to a point after the fact, but it's best to get it right beforehand.

(If you're shooting raw, then you can forget the last few sentences - you can easily adjust white balance to your heart's content afterwards with no penalty.)

 

[Tickla]

Thank you so much! I tried the settings & I see what you all mean--now I get it!!

 

[Quicklabs]

I just tried this, too! What a world of difference. I thought I had a crappy camera. Now I know I'm just a crappy photographer! LOL

 

[photo_chick]

I just tried this, too! What a world of difference. I thought I had a crappy camera. Now I know I'm just a crappy photographer! LOL

Not crappy, just unfamilliar with all the camera's features!