Color temperature

The scale runs contrary to intuition: the lower the number, the warmer the light. Candlelight sits near 1,900 K; tungsten theatrical sources near 3,200 K; daylight from roughly 5,600 K upward into the blue. The measure derives from physics — the color an idealized body glows when heated to a given temperature — but its use in performance is entirely perceptual: warmth reads as intimacy, memory, interior; coolness as day, distance, institution. Designers mix temperatures within a single state the way a colorist grades a film.

For documentation, color temperature is where recordings quietly lie. A camera must be told what to call white; automatic white balance treats the warmth of a tungsten state as an error and corrects it toward neutral, rewriting the work’s palette while appearing perfectly faithful. Two recordings of the same state, balanced differently, disagree about the work.

Disciplined capture therefore fixes white balance deliberately, records what it was set to, and keeps references — source specifications, meter readings, charts photographed in known light — so a future reader can separate the light the audience saw from the choices the camera made. The state’s warmth is content, not noise; the record must say which is which.