White Balance

[mgphotos]

Can someone please advise me on these images? It looks to me like the white balance is changing. Is this happening because I'm shooting in auto WB and if so what do you recommend using when shooting these night games?







Mark

[LSCSN.com]

It's the cycling lights. And outside of using a flash there is not much you are going to be able to do about it :-(.

[Bob_S]

The exif data is missing but usually what happens is as your shutter speed increases, so does the amount of flicker you capture from the lights cycling with the AC. Shoot in RAW and don't worry about WB when you're shooting.

[John Godwin]

Yep, cycling lights. If your shutter speed is faster than 1/60 there is nothing you can do about adjusting for the white balance unless you shoot with a flash or strobes. With them you can then overcome the ambient light. Nothing that is unless you are content with adjusting your white balance by using a gray card or some other iteration and then expect that only about 1 in 6 will be correct if you are lucky.

There is something you can do after the photo is taken.

Take the picture in RAW. If you are like me you will find it is easier to adjust the white balance on a raw file with a calibrated monitor so that what you see is what you get. I quit trying to adjust the white balance on a JPEG file, to much trouble for me.

[mgphotos]

Thanks all: I didn't realize the cycling of the lights would make it vary that much. With that being an issue if I were to set the WB to say 4900 kelvin will that produce a difference as well? I suppect it will. It seems that it's more noticeable in some stadiums than others. Raw would probably be an answer I was just try to avoid the processing.

Mark

[John Godwin]

By finding the Kelvin that is in the middle of the extremes you may be satisfied with the results. Kelvin can be changed in post processing. You are still going to have the changing of white balance because of the cycling. There is no magic bullet for cycling lights. You have to learn to live with whatever you get, use strobes/flash, shoot slower than 1/60 or post process.

When I cannot use strobes/flash I post process and get the white balance close for casual viewing. If I am going to print then time and effort is involved in getting the white balance really close.

[mgphotos]

Going back thru some of the other games I've shot I do see this and just hadn't paid that much attention to it. Here's another sample showing of 5 consecutive images shot at the same field a few weeks back and using the same settings. Sorry on exif data but I've been shooting at ISO3200 - f2.8 - SS400.



Mark