Mr. Bill and others,
Yes I am dissatisfied with the auto white balance. It cannot deal
with mixed lighting issues... that is the real problem. As others
here have stated, it is a very difficult problem to compensate for,
I'm thinking my best bet is to continue with what I am doing...
shooting a grey card to make the photo the best I can in post
production. Fluorescent lighting with flash is the biggest
problem... when I encounter this I always inform the couple that
this is one of a photographer's worse nightmares as concerns correct
color... many times if the "green hair" cast is really bad I will
just do the best black and white conversion with channel mixer I can
do.
On a related note, I use a Gary Fong lightsphere, have for years and
love the results. I know some people hate it and others swear by it,
I just know it works for me better than anything else I have used.
But to the point, there is an "amber dome" made for it to balance
the flash output with tungsten lighting. It does a pretty nice job
if you set your camera white balance to tungsten. I wrote Mr. Fong
about creating a dome to correct for fluorescent lighting and the
reply I received was that they have thought of it and tried it, but
basically gave up due to the color output of fluorescent lighting
being all over the map. It just did not work.
So bottom line, photography is NOT a perfect science, and all we can
do is deal with issues as best we can, especially in a wedding
situation, where time to "play" with color meters and compensating
filters is just not practical.
Thanks for all the input on this issue... very interesting to get
other's take on it.
Steve
Unfortunately, photography is more a 'perfect science' than we like.
The colour accomodation that our eyes and brains perform causes us to
not perceive the nasty mixed lighting issues, and we are then
surprised and upset at the 'realistic' rendering we get on film and
sensors.
I've used dual axis colour meters for a long time, and they are only
good for correcting one light source. Providing your own light and
balancing for that is the only real way to get accurate colour, but
you then are faced with suppressing the other conflicting light
sources which is often not possible.
As Stan Patz has pointed out, stationary objects lend themselves to a
variety of remedial actions, but situations like weddings will be a
nightmare, and in the end you will get some nasty colours.
When I started out doing architectural photography, interiors
generally used just one or a limited range of light source types, and
a limited number. It was possible to correct for the primary source
with colour metering and filtering and get a good picture. In other
cases it was even possible to replace conflicting light sources with
sources that had the same spectral output as the main source. Then
lighting designers moved to combining multiple types of light sources
in all sorts of odd fixtures, often in great numbers so that
balancing became impossible, and lighting it yourself defeated the
designer's whole concept. Fortunately, by that time Fuji Reala was
available, and I managed to convince clients that chromes were a bad
idea. That helped quite a bit. Digital makes things easier again, but
not for moving objects.
I still have my Minolta colour meter and a couple of thousand dollars
worth of filters (original price! :-)) but haven't used them in a
long time.
Shoot B&W! :-)
--
* Henning J. Wulff
/|\ Wulff Photography & Design
/###\ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|[ ]| http://www.archiphoto.com
*
****
*******
***********************************************************
* For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see:
* http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm
***********************************************************
