The Concept:
Have you ever taken a photo of a beautiful sunrise or sunset with all those warm hues that we love (like oranges, yellows, reds, etc.) only to find that your resulting image was lackluster at best. Or maybe, you might want to make your average sunset photo look more warm and pleasing? Either way, one of most rewarding concepts, in my opinion, for sunrise/sunset photography is the difference that changing your white balance can make in the camera.
In essence, the mistake most photographers make is to leave their cameras in Auto WB all the time including at the beginning and the end of the day. The problem is that Auto WB allows the camera to adjust the color reproduction and when the scene you are shooting has lots of warm tones in it, the camera thinks that it should make the warmness turn cooler and adds blue back in, often ruining the effect you were going for. Therefore, if you did nothing else, you could use your Daylight/Direct Sun WB setting instead of Auto WB and likely will get a result truer to what you see. However, if this does not reproduce the scene accurately, or if you are like me and you would like to accentuate the effect of the warmth, you have some other options. In terms of using the preset (the WB “modes”) on the camera, going to Cloudy/Overcast adds some warmth and going to Shade adds even more. Or if you would rather use the Kelvin WB control on your camera, the higher you go on your Kelvin temperature, the warmer the image will be. The warmest you can do on most cameras is 10,000 degrees Kelvin. Below you can see examples of all the different WB options I tried on a photo of the sun about 20 mins before sunset last night as well as an image of the color the way it actually was.
The Assignment:
Get up early or go out late and try a variety of different white balance settings on your camera of the sunrise or sunset. It is a ton of fun to not only know which setting records it accurately, but to make it into whatever “look” you favor all in the camera.