Shun Photography: Killiney Road

Newcomers to the D70 are often dismayed with their first pictures out of the Nikon D70. "Why are the pictures so dark... And the colors so dull and drab?"

It need not be so.

In digital photography, white balance -- and an understanding of it -- is critical to getting good colors. Since the quality and quantity of light ie color temperature varies from location to location, you need to change and finetune the WB setting appropriate to your shoot.

For an introduction to white balance, click here.

For a more indepth treatment, see Moose Petersen's excellent article on WB at nikondigital.org. He recommends you don't use auto WB, but experiment and set your own appropriate to the location. He has found for instance that Cloudy -3 comes closest to his everyday shooting color temperature / WB needs.

A WB setting more appropriate for our tropical sun is provided by David Chin. Those without prior background in digital photography would find his approach to the D70 camera settings highly commendable.

In Singapore, I use the following as my general everyday D70 setting, and has been pleased with the results so far:

White Balance: AWB -3
Hue: -3
Saturation: Normal
Sharpening: None
Compensation: +0.3EV
Color Mode: Ia (sRGB)
Sharpening is set to none because the in-camera sharpening -- owing to a small buffer -- is weak compared to NC or PS. For this series, Quality was set to jpg - fine, large and color mode to Ia.

Below are some photos taken at Killiney Road under the 4 pm sun with the above settings:
D70, kit lens @18mm, 1/60@f/8