White Balances Changes from Pic to Pic in Burst Mode

Eos 30D, Different lens and settings, all different white balance settings,

tried with 2 different bodies.

Shooting in artificial light, mostly gyms and night football.

When shooting a burst of pics, the colors/white balance of the pictures

changes.

I have duplicated in living room with camera on tripod and shooting burst of 5

pictures. It seems to be worse with faster shutter speeds.

Canon thinks it is the flicker rate of the different types of lights.

If that is the case what can I do to get consistent burst mode pictures when

shooting indoor sports and night time football games with fast shutter and

high ISO. I am unable to use flash.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I have samples but do not know how to post them.

Yup, fluorescents in particular change their color balance through the AC cycle so it

depends where in the cycle you capture it. Longer shutter speeds will average that out

more and appear "better" and shorter will catch the color cast more faithfully as it

changes!

If you can, before the event, check out any part of the venue (wall paint, window frame etc)

that you believe really is white or neutral gray and try and get some of it in the image.

Then you can use the eyedroppers in PS (curves or levels) to correct it after the fact. If

they'll let you, put up a few inconspicuous white pieces of paper strategically so you get at

least a few pixels in each shot of a "known" color. This won't fix it completely but will

make a big difference....

Canon's tech people are right. Gym and stadium lights often suffer from cycling of their output (usually at twice the mains frequency), which can lead to underexposure and even varying exposure across the frame. Some lights also produce varying colour output as they cycle.

The only ways to deal with it are to accept that you won't be able to take action shots, and limit your shutter speed to 1/125th (i.e. half a 60Hz mains cycle) which will produce even lighting; to indulge in a lot of post processing fo RAW images to try to rescue them; or to try to persuade the venues to improve their lighting, or only shoot at venues with better lighting.

One fairly simple way of improving the lighting is to use a 3 phase supply. That way only one phase is low at a time and the other two phases keep the light level up.<div></div>

The best solution would be to shoot RAW and white balance each shot manually for the best results.

Indoor arenas may use fluroescent lighting, but I'd have thought stadium lighting for outdoors would more likely be tungsten, which isn't usually subject to a flicker effect.

It's just the nature of the beast. I always shoot a gray card at 1/60 of a second when I get to any indoor event to get a good average custom WB.

No need to use RAW just for WB purposes if you don't normally shoot RAW, for you can adjust the white balance with a JPG image using Levels or Curves.

Hell I thought someone had dropped my camera once too often. I have had this same problem with a D1H and a D2H. The D2H is my primary camera and I've noticed several times that in a burst sequence under high school football lights the WB and exposure are going all over the place. This has been true in different stadiums including some Division 1 schools. I'm shooting available light so flash doesn't figure in. It has been driving me nuts,different color and exposure shifts. I had not experienced it with a the 10D and 20D I used to shoot but I wasn't doing rapid seqences with them in these conditions. The D2H is a freaking rocket ship in comparison. I feel better about this issue now.

Rick H.