Three colour temps in one location - how to adjust/gel?

divamum

In one spot:

- fluorescent
- daylight
- flash

How do you gel/balance for the mixture? It'd be kind of neat to play with the temps for efffect if possible, but I'm wondering how to make it work so that nothing comes out too weird looking. Thoughts?

Tim Kamppinen

divamum wrote:

In one spot:

- fluorescent
- daylight
- flash

How do you gel/balance for the mixture? It'd be kind of neat to play with the temps for efffect if possible, but I'm wondering how to make it work so that nothing comes out too weird looking. Thoughts?

Well, there are a few options from easy to difficult/expensive. First, and probably the best option, is to get rid of either the fluorescent or the daylight. You could turn off the fluorescent lights and just use daylight and flash, with no gels since flashes are already daylight balanced. Or, depending on the location, you could close the blinds or otherwise block out the daylight, then gel your flash to match the fluorescent.

On the expensive and impractical end of things, you could get a huge sheet of plus green gel and put it over the window, as well as gelling your flash. That way everything would match the fluorescent... I'm guessing this isn't what you want to do. Or many large sheets of magenta gel over the fluorescents, which is even less practical and more expensive.

Depending on the level of ambient, you could also just overpower it so that everything is lit with flash. This will of course require more power from your flash and drain the batteries faster though. It might also be difficult to light the whole room evenly depending on it's shape.

If you just gel your flash without blocking the daylight, then anything lit by daylight in your shot will have a magenta cast to it, depending on how much of the light falling on it is daylight. If you don't gel your flash and leave the fluorescent lights on, when they are in your shot they will look green and will give a green cast to anything that they are contributing light to.

If there is a significant amount of daylight in the room, enough for people to do whatever they are doing, then I would just turn off the lights. That's the easiest and most surefire way to get everything looking good.

pathfinder

Joe McNally recs the switch on the wall to turn off the fluorescent lights as the most effective filter, if you can use it.

ziggy53

If, for instance, you need to shoot a room scene and the fluorescent lights are part of the scene, you should replace the common fluorescent lights with bulbs that have close to daylight output, as indicated by their CRI (Color Rendering Index).

If the fluorescent lights are not part of the scene, substitute electronic flash for that position.

While true daylight and electronic flash are not often perfectly interchangeable, they are generally close enough that choosing the dominant source for WB and then using curves to adjust shadows and highlights should get you very close, depending on how you use/configure the lighting.

divamum

Sorry - didn't see the replies until now!

The shoot was actually last Saturday. In theory, I had no control over the interior lights (the fluor) since it's a large, institutional building, BUT for once I got lucky and they hadn't even been switched on so it proved to be a non-issue.

I'm still glad I asked the question though (there's always a "next time"...)

Thanks!