Balancing flash with strip lights in shed.

kennysarmy

kennysarmy

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I may be shooting in a large shed tomorrow which has strip lights in the ceiling for dim days - of which there are a lot!

I have some coloured gels for my flash but am very confused as to how to tell which gel to use for particular lights.

Is this there a way to tell by shooting in a set WB on the camera?

I don't want to light solely with the flash, I want some of the ambient light to be part of the exposure. Whether that be from the windows or the strip lights.

After a quick visit to the venue today I am thinking starting with settings around ISO 800, f5.6 and see what shutter speed I can get away with, the model will be pretty static, lit from the RHS by a couple of windows.
I want to snoot my on-camera speedlight and bounce some light in from camera left without letting any fall directly on the subject.

My worry is if the lights are on above if it's later in the afternoon evening when I get there that my flash light will not match the strip lights above....

Any help appreciated.
 
You've ignored the elephant in the room, the windowlight!

Either the windowlight or the flourescent will be the wrong colour, if your flash matches one of them, there'll still be an odd coloured light. Frankly I'd leave the flourescent off unless you're seriously overpowering it and just using it to light the background.

If you really want everything to appear the same colour, be prepared to gel the windows (and the flash).
 
kennysarmy said:
hmmmm good point... so leave the lights off - and the flash will balance the window light without the complications of the gels?
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Yes,

If you leave the lights on, the windowlight and flash ought to overpower them. You could perhaps get a little of the fluorescent to act as ambient.
 
Alternatively if they're not in frame, you could overpower the ambient, gel your flashes with a half green filter, and it'd match the strip lighting.
 
Pheo said:
Alternatively if they're not in frame, you could overpower the ambient, gel your flashes with a half green filter, and it'd match the strip lighting.
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It would - but the daylight coming through the windows would be a weird colour:).
 
Phil V said:
It would - but the daylight coming through the windows would be a weird colour:).
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are flashes not daylight balanced?
 
Pheo said:
are flashes not daylight balanced?
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Not when they're gelled to match the strip lighting ;)

Pheo said:
Alternatively if they're not in frame, you could overpower the ambient, gel your flashes with a half green filter, and it'd match the strip lighting.
Click to expand...

Which is what I was answering, although a longer answer would have concluded that overpowering the ambient was a fools errand if you were then matching the striplights, which wouldn't register at all once the sun had been overpowered.

The simple answer - as I said earlier, is to ignore the striplights entirely as they're both the weakest and nastiest of the 3 lightsources.
 
Phil V said:
Not when they're gelled to match the strip lighting ;)



Which is what I was answering, although a longer answer would have concluded that overpowering the ambient was a fools errand if you were then matching the striplights, which wouldn't register at all once the sun had been overpowered.

The simple answer - as I said earlier, is to ignore the striplights entirely as they're both the weakest and nastiest of the 3 lightsources.
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Hah, my bad!
 
if you have ambient light and strip lights (which are nasty), why don't you just turn them off when shooting after you've setup .??

/re-read, someone mentioned this much earlier on..
 
So, worrying about the colour of different mixed light sources, really didn't matter in a black and white image in the end....
 
Ah thats them, good stuff.
 
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