How often do you use gel filter on flash?

After doing 4 weddings, I'm starting to see that some indoors photos with

incandescent lights causes everything to be orange when I bounce flash. Do I

need to use gel filters? Do I use gel filters when ambient light and flash temp

is too big of a difference? Thanks

How often do I gel my flash? Any time I have to mix flash and tungsten, out come the CTOs. $20 will get you a sheet of full, 3/4, and 1/2 CTO, and a little bit of velcro will give you a cheap, easy, "strobist" style of mounting them. Use them once, and you'll wonder why you didn't from the start.

 

Depending on the type of bulbs, age of bulbs, and if they're dimmed, the color temperature can be fairly different, so it helps to take a test shot or two - but still, even if you just throw on a 3/4 or full CTO and start shooting, you're going to be wildly, vastly closer than you would without a gel.

 

steve

Do a search. This question has been asked several times. Here is just one of many.

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00CO4h&tag=

 

As for how often, I don't gel very often. Only when I am really dragging the shutter and am bothered by the orange color. Fluorescent gels don't work as well.

I have a CTO taped to the inside of my Lightsphere dome. It makes a little difference.

CTO? I know a lot of the abbreviations, but this one has me stumped.

At weddings I never use gels, just power up your flash some. Jon Jacobson has had some neat results with gels, maybe he'll share....but, I think it's reserved for a slaved speedlite in multi-speedlite setups.

Steve Wolf +1

 

It really opens things up to drag the shutter, and an amber gel on the flash adds pop and fills shadows without making the subject look like they've been hit with a pie. It's a pleasant change from the "deer in the headlights". I've been working out - I hardly notice that pack of gels any more.

CTO: Color Temperature Orange or Convert Temperature Orange. It converts 5400K light to 3400K. A Half-CTO is...half as strong, and a quarter-CTO is half of that.

 

I used to always keep a half-CTO gel taped to my flash, when most sites used tungsten. Now, with flourescents and other mixes, it's not as safe, but still worth considering.

 

BTW, I rarely used a full conversion; leaving the background a little bit warm was fine, while having it orange generally was excessive.

Converting electronic flash to 3400K will get you in the ballpark but most ordinary light bulbs are more in the 2800K to 2900K range, and then only if they're getting full line voltage. In other words, the light is warmer than 3400K. Vivitar used to make, and maybe still does, an orange plastic filter for their flashes that did a pretty good job.

<p><i>"BTW, I rarely used a full conversion; leaving the background a little bit warm was fine, while having it orange generally was excessive."</i></p>

 

<p>I find myself using the full quite often when the lamps have been dimmed, rendering their color temperature even lower. I've never had to stack two together, and hope that I never do. :)</p>