Your camera wants to see the world in 50% gray. It's not her fault she's programmed that way. Your camera wants the shadows and the lights to be balanced and she wants no color cast from an incorrect white balance. Using the automatic exposure programs on your camera, you will get correctly exposured photos with reliable color replication.

Or not. Try for example a photo of a candlelight scene. Your camera will correct the warm light from the candle to a neutral white light. This will give you a more or less correct color reproduction from a color chart, but maybe that's not what you want to do when you sit with your family under the Christmas tree. Maybe you would rather reproduce the ambient and the feeling of the scene. But with the white balance set to automatic the candlelight will appear neutral white on your photo. "That's not how I remembered the evening", you will say when looking at the photos "where did all the warmth go?

Was the warmth only in your head? Of course not. It was in the warm light of the candles and your camera is to blame for making it disappear. In order to get beautiful colors I always have my white balance set to daylight, even when working with tungsten light sources. Especially when working with tungsten.

So, override the automatic white balance on your camera. That's the first trick to get beautiful colors. The second trick is to override your cameras exposure program. A lot of my pictures are quite heavy underexposed, often by one full stop or even more. Let me explain this.

Put your camera away and picture a red light with a dimmer. Pull the dimmer all the way down without switching off the light and you will get a very weak red light. Maybe your eyes hurt a little bit because it's hard to make it out. Now pull the dimmer to the other extreme and you will get a very strong red light that really hurts in your eyes.

Now pull the dimmer in the middle, take your camera and switch it to manual mode. Set shutter speed, aperture and ISO to a value that gives you a nice photo of the red light. Without changing your camera settings, you can now play with the dimmer and take several photos.

What happens? You don't get a photo with a red light that hurts in your eyes when you pull the dimmer to the maximum. No, the light appears simply white. Somehow for the camera the color changes when you change the brightness. But not for our eyes! In this case the camera shows the wrong color.

On the chart below you can see what happens when you do the same in Photoshop. I took a red color and "dimmed" it up and down (by simply increasing and decreasing brightness). But here's the thing: you only get at darker or a brighter red within a small area, outside that area the color changes again. To the right the red gets more rose or salmon and finally becomes white. To the left the red becomes brown and eventually turns black. That's very different from how our eyes handle colors of different values in brightness.



For my photos I find most colors look best when their brightness is somewhere in the lower half of the histogram (If you don't know how to read a histogram: [link]). In this part of the histogram the colors are saturated, strong and full of details and contrast. But they're not screaming and not glowing. They are calm.
As you can see in the histogram next to my finished photo below, 92% (!) of the pixels are below the midpoint in brightness.



This is a far scream away from a balanced exposure how you usually would do it. I never went to photo school but maybe they would fail you for doing something like this. So how does it look when you do it "by the book", which exposure and white balance set  "correctly"? Here it is: 

If I don't override the cameras exposure program the histogram will look very evenly distributed between shadows and lights (with 50% of the pixels below the middle and 50% above it). And if I don't override the correct white balance, the warm light disappears, leaving the picture's feeling much more neutral.

But can you see how washed out and undefined the colors become when you do it "by the book"?