Color Temp.

[AndrewM]

I have a question about the temperature of lights. I understand that 3200K are lights balanced for indoor and 5500K is light balanced for outdoors. My confusion arises with exterior scenes at night or during the day.

If your lighting a scene at night with straight 3200K or 5500K is the color going to look off compared to the night sky and landscape? It matters from what source the light is coming, so if it was moonlight I could half correct an HMI or use a pale blue gel on 32. However if I don't want that look of moonlight (not realistic), can a scene pretty much just lit with white light (maybe to match street lights that don’t throw off the orange cast) using the 32 or 55 with some underexposure and w/out gels do the trick? My main concern is the scene (w/out gels) going to look like indoor light or daylight is lighting it?

Also during sunrise and sunset if you want to add some fill with a small HMI, since the color is more of an orange look is that 5500K going to throw off the balance as well.

 

[element80]

the 5600 outdoor color temp is really just a standard than anything else. Different factors can make the color temp higher or lower. Your best bet is to test and see what the color temp actually is, wither by white balancing w/o lights and then correcting them with gels untilt ehy look right, or using a color temperature meter.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

A 5500K light shot on 3200K film stock will look blue-ish, as if you had use Full CTB on a 3200K lamp. Now you could gel the 5500K lamp to something closer to 3200K, or you could time the image to be less blue.

How it matches other sources in the scene depends on what those other sources are -- blue-green mercury-vapor? Orange-red sodium-vapor? White tungsten? Warm tungsten? Cool white flourescents?