Rocking the high ISOs

TylerW · March 13, 2007

Shot a benefit event last weekend at a club here in San Francisco. I shot a huge amount of images that I (and the client!) were very pleased with, but I felt my strongest were the shots of the bands - especially as this was mosty unfamiliar territory to me. Low light, High iso. Made some use of flash but most was available light.

The benefit was to raise money to help a young girl with Rett Syndrome (http://www.rettsyndrome.org/). Comments and critiques welcomed, otherwise feel free to persure the rest of the images here: http://www.tylerwinegarner.com/gallery/2548932#134032315

ian408 · March 13, 2007

Looks like you've got some winners.

peterst6906 · March 13, 2007

Hi Tyler,

Some great shots, really like the No. 2 and 4, but also 3 and 5.

With the first one, it looks to me like the skin is a little too cool. It looks like he's in more natural lighting than the others, so I think his skin should look a bit more normal as well.

I hope you don't mind, but I've made a quick adjustment to practice a bit and posted it for comparison.

Regards,

Peter

Owen · March 13, 2007

peterst6906 wrote:

Hi Tyler,

Some great shots, really like the No. 2 and 4, but also 3 and 5.

With the first one, it looks to me like the skin is a little too cool. It looks like he's in more natural lighting than the others, so I think his skin should look a bit more normal as well.

I hope you don't mind, but I've made a quick adjustment to practice a bit and posted it for comparison.

Regards,

Peter

Hey Peter,
Can you explain what/how you did this?

TylerW · March 14, 2007

peterst6906 wrote:

Hi Tyler,

Some great shots, really like the No. 2 and 4, but also 3 and 5.

With the first one, it looks to me like the skin is a little too cool. It looks like he's in more natural lighting than the others, so I think his skin should look a bit more normal as well.

I hope you don't mind, but I've made a quick adjustment to practice a bit and posted it for comparison.

Regards,

Peter

Good catch. I'm pretty unused to flash photography, so I'm still developing an eye for how skin tones can go cooler under flash lighting. It may be my display which I'm on at the moment, which is uncalibrated, but this looks perhaps a bit too warm. Maybe splitting the difference?

LiquidAir · March 14, 2007

Nice shots. I particularly like #2 and #4.

TylerW wrote:

I'm pretty unused to flash photography, so I'm still developing an eye for how skin tones can go cooler under flash lighting. It may be my display which I'm on at the moment, which is uncalibrated, but this looks perhaps a bit too warm. Maybe splitting the difference?

In #1 if you look at his (presumably) white shirt, you will see that the shadow the guitar look bluish and the shirt looks yellowish. I'm guessing that the light on him was a halogen with a color temperature around 3300K. Your flash has a color temperature of around 5000K. It looks like the two different light colors are mixing at nearly equal levels. Color balancing a shot like this is hard and can leave you pulling your hair out.

There are two options when shooting in an environment like this to lessen this problem:

1. Gel the flash with CTO orange to match the flash color to the tungstens. You may find yourself needing a range of CTO gels (1/4 CTO, 1/2 CTO, etc) to get it right for different environments.

2. Dial in around -1 flash exposure compensation to lower the fill level from your flash. A bluish tinge to the shadows is visually more acceptable if the shadows are darker.