Paul Cox Photography

You often see posts about using CTO (colour temperature orange) gels in images to add a bit of warmth to certain parts of the image.  This is a really good suggestion and it also makes the background look more blue as well.  However what I wanted to do was to make rather dull natural light look more interesting by creating a ‘sunset’ effect.  Trouble was, if I ‘warmed up’ the natural light by dialling in a lower colour temperature the light from the flash got warmer too.  This is where CTB (colour temperature blue) gels come in, this will make the flash light appear blue (a higher colour temperature) and if you balance your image to this blue light then the natural light will look much more orange creating the sunset effect.  Add a smoke machine and, perhaps, an unfiltered rim light (to put a warm rim around the model) and the effect is complete.

The great part about this is that it can be done at almost no cost, assuming you have some sort of off camera flash.  The Strobist gel pack is about £10 which includes several strengths of CTB as well as a wide gamut of other filters at a size that will fit most flash guns.  If you have studio lights then a sheet of CTB gel will run to less than £5.  I’d suggest getting a quarter CTB that way you can layer the gels if it’s not strong enough.

To get an approximation of what the image will look like in camera I turn the colour temperature up as high as it will go (10,000) but shoot a grey card so that I can set the colour balance correctly later in Capture One when working on the RAW files.  I’ve put a few examples of images using this technique below but you can see others on my Flickr stream here