really bad lighting & flash - WB

[kaiyen]

Hi all,

 

I shot a quinceanera a few months ago and the lighting in the church was really,

really bad. Even to the naked eye, which tends to adjust lights towards white,

it was a sickly green.

 

Now, should I have continued to use the flash and white balanced to that mixture

of flash and ambiant? Or should I have increased ISO and balanced to the

ambiant? I feel like this is a stupidly simple quesetion, but it just occured

to me and I'm not ure of the answer. The mixture will change as I am closer and

farther away. And yes, I shot in RAW and can change it, but I want to get it

close in-camera.

 

thanks,

 

allan

[gluteal cleft]

You can up the ISO and use ambient, use your flash as the main light, or use your flash as fill.

 

Using ambient is alright, you can correct for white balance later. Using flash as main is fine. But using flash as fill when ambient is so off results in very strange color-balance issues that are hard to correct for without a lot of work, because the color isn't consistant across the image. For example, the closer someone is to your flash, the more blue they will be, and the farther they are, the more green.

 

The answer in that situation is to put gels or color filters on your flash. CTO (color temperature orange_ gels work to match your flash to tungsten lighting, and there's a green (window pane green?) set to match flash to fluorescent lighting. They typically come in 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, and full color, and can be stacked.

 

You can make a slip-on box out of cardstock and mount the gels in there, or use Velcro, like the "strobist" guy. They come in handy for other situations, too, like using the CTOs to get your flash closer to warm sunset tones.

[jfr]

Yes, it can be terrible and using flash with green lighting, will probably give you horrible coloured backgrounds. I'd suggest using a gel on your flash(you can buy basic gel packs that will allow you to get the color of your flash to match the ambient light). Other options are shooting film (fuji's 4th layer will eliminate it quite a bit) or shooting B&W.

[picturesque]

I assume you were dealing with fluorescent ambient lighting? You have choices, as you described, but going totally ambient is not a good solution if you have to up your ISO so high that you get noise, etc. In the case of using flash, you can kind of balance the flash to the ambient by using gels, but fluorescent is harder to deal with than tungsten since any daylight seeping into the background will come out ugly... And as you say, the balance of one to the other will change depending on subject distance. You can also just cut out as much of the fluorescent as possible, depending on the location. In a medium, white room you can successfully do this by bouncing the flash. Using off camera flashes also helps in this area. Look up previous posts on using gels on this forum. There have been several.

[wigwam jones]

I've found the expodisc to be a useful tool for setting WB whether using the ambient light, flash, or a mix. I'm just getting used to using it, but it seems to work pretty well so far.

 

Naturally, a whi-bal card can also be used - but this does require that you set your white point in Photoshop or similar program. If the expodisc does what it so far appears to do, very little post-processing is required.

 

This is only a partial recommendation, as I'm just getting used to using it. So far, so good.

 

http://www.expodisc.com/

[kaiyen]

Thanks everyone. Great help. I have seen some of the gels threads, but wasn't sure if that was the best way to go.

 

This one case I was referring to seemed almost like sodium vapor lights, they were so off. It was really terrible. Apparently the church is infamous in the area :-).

 

allan

[todd_masters]

sodium and mercury lights are hard to balance, even with gels. We have a notorious church in our area with mercury vapor and most of us have resorted to a 900w/s mono that we blast at the high ceiling and light the whole place up to overtake the mercury lights by about 2 stops. I guess next time either try gels or just rent a gun and create your own light ;)

[kaiyen]

Todd,

 

That's a really good idea. It wouldn't have worked for this one event, as I was one of _5_ photographers (5 different girls) and the communication would've been crazy. But really good idea. I'll see if I can do it next time.

 

If I start picking up jobs on a semi-regular basis I'll be able to eventually stop renting stuff and getting my own lights here and there. That would be nice flexibility.

 

So you would flash meter it to, say, f11 and shoot at f5.6? So that the flash would be the only source of light?

 

allan

 

allan