Night Long Exposure - Best White Balance & Focus?

[smoke23]

I've been doing some night long exposure photos recently. These are AEB - 5 brackets merged to HDR in Lightroom, F/5.8, ISO 100, 3 Second Shutter.

What's the best manual white balance setting for night photography?

I've found the Auto Focus Continuous isn't great at night, is it best to set to infinity for long exposure?

Thanks!

 

[shockwave199]

I have always set my white balance manually by balancing as true a color representation of indoors and outdoors- indoors not because I fly indoors but because it offers a variety of color to match and I know those colors very well. Not very scientific but it works. I match up what my eye sees and the camera color as close as possible. For the p4p, that puts the white balance at 4800. For my P3, it was much lower than that. I also have chosen to stick with the true color profile as its not too saturated and crushed. You need to set manual focus infinity for most everything in flight. Just hit the infinity icon and that's it really. Not hard and will drastically improve your focus. Auto focus at night especially with long exposure will not work well. Also enable gimbal lock too, in settings. If your colors are too saturated in night shots you can pull the saturation down some too in the camera settings.

 

[ravedog]

If shooting raw, the white balance can be chosen/corrected after the fact.

 

[KevMo Photog]

Best night exposures are at 100ISO period for stills if possible. The wind is your only factor that will keep you from getting sharp pics if your exposures are real long like 4-6 seconds. If it is dead calm you can shoot 4-6 sec exposures and be tack sharp. If it is blowing 15mph then you'll do good to get sharp at 1 second or so. I like stopping lens down to about F4 to F5.6. Then set shutter accordingly. White balance at night with city shots is going to be a matter of taste as you are dealing with so many diff light sources. Some are way red and then some are way blue etc. So like ravedog just said it's best to set it on 5000 and then tweak it from there in RAW Conversion. And great tip from shockwave too on locking down the gimble on your really long exposure shots. I had forgot that until just now. Thanks shockwave!

 

[shockwave199]

^^No problem! Also another setting is to auto turn off front LED's. That'll make red lights out during photo/video. It's important for video but paramount for photos.