What is your workflow for establishing WB in a room with florescent or even mixed lighting where flash is necessary? I admittedly have more experimenting to do, but I only have a G2 at the moment, (in addition to my film cameras) and the custom WB setting does not involve an exposure, so I'm not sure how to factor in flash color temp with say, florescent. I'm wondering on the one hand how to do this with the G2, and secondly if this is significantly easier and/or better with a DSLR, and finally if the various Canon DSLRs differ in how they approach this classic problem. Do all DSLRs allow you to fire a flash at the moment of measuring CWB? I know, best is to avoid FL, but I've been doing a lot of on-location shoots lately and can't always choose. This week I needed to work digitally, as the subject was a busy well-known artist only in town for 24 hours and needed to review shots like right away. Not that it's an easy problem to solve with film either.
Ken
I used to shoot a lot of interiors, including 4x5 and 8x10's, and many times the client wanted transparencies. Then, in the 80's, mixed lighting became so common and interior lighting so complex that correct filtering or light matching/balancing became impossible. I convinced clients that I could generally do the job for half the money if they let me shoot colour negative. When Reala became available, I used that if possible. 8x10 was gone anyway. I would filter approximately, and only use supplemental light when necessary. Reala could handle mixed lighting quite well. My Minolta colour meter saw less use, and was only essential when I still took transparencies.
Now, when I shoot digital, I again try to filter into the general range so that I don't get assymetric clipping in the different channels (you lose a lot of dynamic range if you don't filter) and then set the general balance in the RAW conversion software. If the mixed lighting is nasty, I do separate conversions for the separate light sources, and then mix the appropriate areas from several layers in Photoshop.
JPEGs leave you with far fewer options. As has been mentioned, one of the best ideas is to put a CC gel over your flash, and balance things that way. Cheap, cool white flourescents need about CC50 green, while warm white and various deluxe tubes need about CC30 green and maybe an 81EF (52 decamired) or 85C (81 decamired) yellow colour balancing filters to warm up the flash. Set the camera on flourescent and try that. With jpegs you don't want to have to do very much correction, so the closer you filter the better.
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