Peter Menzies Jr: Color Temperature

From American Cinematographer, A Few Bad Men by Jay Holben (July 1999)

"We went pretty saturated with our colors. Sometimes I'd put three of four layers of full CTS on a lamp so it would go into a really weird orange-red spectrum that was close to sodium-vapor in color. As the film went on, we added more color as we got braver about the look, always keeping the actor's skin tones around 2400*k so that they maintained that nice warm look.

I love mixing color temperatures. For the last couple of years, the boys have made fun of me for not using any two lights of the same color. When you do walk down the street in real life, though, nothing is perfect-- there are weird fabulous colors all around you. In my opinion, using something other than white light all the time just makes a scene more realistic. We used a lot of theatrical colors, too. I haven't used traditional CTO for quite a while, since I prefer to use CTS. It drops the color temperature down another 400*K and has a bit more yellow in it than orange."

- Peter Menzies Jr, ASC