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White Balance help – floodlights
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I cant speak for all camera manufacturers but those I do know use a reference of 18% grey (actually its more like 16%) for both exposure and white balance, otherwise if there was no pure white in the frame you could never get an appoximation of colour temperature. I use a 18% grey card from Jessops in church situations where you usually have a mix of daylight, tungsten and stained glass which is just a nightmare and it produces results exactly as ‘seen’.
Thanks to everyone’s discussion on this.
Just to follow up, tonight’s venture was a bit of a washout as the lighting was terribly poor, ‘trackside’ was at least 20 feet from the nearest side so I was limited for reach with a 150mm zoom, and the lighting formed pools of light- the better shooting angles happened to be in the dips (of course), or where I was unable to shoot from. I used custom WB setting taken off my grey card (not the white card) and this indeed gave me images resembling the lighting conditions. 1/15 at f2.8 is as good as it got for ambient light (ISO800), and flash was of limited impact due to the distance, although I did experiement. Some pics came out a bit soft though weather conditions were clear & dry.
To give you an idea of the scenario, I’ve attached one image. There’s nothing technically redeeming about it (so C&C will be ignored unless it’s on-topic!), it’s ‘for the record’ and purely to give anyone interested a visual. In fact, the race was some 15 mins shorter than I anticipated so as I was moving off to the other shooting location (what a choice!) I was surprised to find the chequered flag going & everyone coming back in! Note the ‘strobe’ effect on some of the karts (shot 1/15 f2.8 ). Noise is even prevalent here at ISO800.
Looks like sodium lights to me- These don’t have a continuous spectrum, so they’re always going to be yellow- maybe a b/w conversion might be the answer? (i know this doesn’t address the white balance question, but if there’s no white…)
Yes they were sodium. The pics were all pretty bad, there’s nothing worth keeping or converting! B&W conversion is a godsend isn’t it just?! The nearside of the track fell into the dip from the flood pictured above, and there was just no detail at all. Flash didn’t improve matters as it caught on some abstract reflective surfaces and just got absorbed by the mostly dark everything-else, and was pretty much at it’s range limit on full power.
On the up side I was given a ticket at the last minute to a gig last night and got a few pics from that. I posted them up on my site but will re-work a few of them as I cloned out a few things that are mysteriously still there, plus some of the conversions could do with more work.
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