Best white balance setting?

footydad

footydad

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My office is playing another company in a football match at Bromley FC in few weeks and I'm hopefully going to be taking some match photos. What would be the best white balance setting to use under the floodlights? By the way, I'm using a Canon 7D.
 
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Set your WB on Auto and should the players have white thunks or jerseys or
if there are white add boards, you will be able to sample those in PP and apply
to all the shots!
 
Easier thing to do, at the time, is to use your live view and scroll thru your available white balances to see which looks best. If you shoot raw, you can alter your white balance, after the fact but you may be using jpeg for speed.
 
Kodiak Qc said:
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Set your WB on Auto and should the players have white thunks or jerseys or
if there are white add boards, you will be able to sample those in PP and apply
to all the shots!
Click to expand...

So what your saying is take pictures that are wrong and fix later in PP :( Terrible advice..
Auto WB normaly works under floodlights but if not then find something white to point at and set your WB manually... in other words setup and take a good picture rather than purposely take a bad one to fix later ...


Not been to that ground but to be honest apart from 3g colledge type floodlights the auto WB normally works :)
 
In my experience, it depends on the type of lights. I have shot at many grounds where the lights seem to be throwing out all sorts of colours and so you get yellow casts or blue or whatever. Never mind all the flickering and weird patchy light. I just used Auto WB at these grounds and when the camera gets it wrong, just take out some of the cast after. Not ideal.

I agree with Kipax though, better to try to take the photo correctly in the first place, if you're struggling, use Auto WB.
 
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KIPAX said:
So what your saying is take pictures that are wrong and fix later in PP :( Terrible advice..
Auto WB normaly works under floodlights but if not then find something white to point at and set your WB manually... in other words setup and take a good picture rather than purposely take a bad one to fix later ... Not been to that ground but to be honest apart from 3g colledge type floodlights the auto WB normally works :)
Click to expand...
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I fail to understand where the "Terrible advice" is…
If using Auto WB brings one pretty close to the wanted result, a single properly
sampled point applied to all the takes while still in RAW will not represent any
disadvantage!
 
Kodiak Qc said:
•
Set your WB on Auto and should the players have white thunks or jerseys or
if there are white add boards, you will be able to sample those in PP and apply
to all the shots!
Click to expand...


Where possible you should always try and get things correct in the camera ie WB, Exposure, Framing, etc etc and not rely on PP.

George.
 
Shoot in RAW with Auto White Balance & tweak in PP.

If you set a custom white balance for the external lighting it's guaranteed you'll forget to change it for indoor shots & have to fix them anyway :)
 
mrgubby said:
Shoot in RAW with Auto White Balance & tweak in PP. If you set a custom white balance for the external lighting it's guaranteed you'll forget to change it for indoor shots & have to fix them anyway :)
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Lots of wisdom there!
 
DG Phototraining said:
unless you don't shoot in raw I suppose
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Nail - Head. I've found that in the Sports Section, very few of the regular pro's will be shooting raw, time constraints, reduced burst mode size, the requirement to get the pictures wired off before anyone else, and simply the size of the files preclude anything that takes extra steps in post-production - in short, its down to "getting it right (or as right as possible) in the camera"

for the OP's particular set of circumstances, I'm going out on a limb here and guess that most of the constraints I mentioned above wouldn't necessarily be in force - though the over-riding factor could still be the speedier handling in burst-mode to get "the decisive moment" shot.

FWIW, i'd be taking the "set a custom WB" and shooting in JPG route, but that's because I missed a few shots the last time I tried using RAW through having to wait while my camera was "buffering"
 
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TheBigYin said:
Nail - Head. I've found that in the Sports Section, very few of the regular pro's will be shooting raw, time constraints, reduced burst mode size, the requirement to get the pictures wired off before anyone else, and simply the size of the files preclude anything that takes extra steps in post-production - in short, its down to "getting it right (or as right as possible) in the camera"

for the OP's particular set of circumstances, I'm going out on a limb here and guess that most of the constraints I mentioned above wouldn't necessarily be in force - though the over-riding factor could still be the speedier handling in burst-mode to get "the decisive moment" shot.

FWIW, i'd be taking the "set a custom WB" and shooting in JPG route, but that's because I missed a few shots the last time I tried using RAW through having to wait while my camera was "buffering"
Click to expand...


Makes perfect sense - so my idea of walking into the pitch with a grey card is valid then ;)

Dave
 
DG Phototraining said:
so my idea of walking into the pitch with a grey card is valid then ;)Dave
Click to expand...

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Right! …how could I have figured out that an amateur game between two companies
required the same urgent access to the shots as a pro for an agency!?!?!?
 
Auto White Balance - my experience is that the floodlights cycle through different colors, so one shot may look different from another. I often 'tweak' shots for a bit of color balance after if they need it. Shoot raw if you feel the need.
 
Juts done a swimming job this morning.. thats how the pool looked on the left.... quick setup of WB took a minute thats all.. then I was able to shoot the JOB in jpg and they all come out right... No purposely taking bad pictures and fixing later .. I will always say that advising people to take bad pictures and fix on the computer is very poor advice..


wb22.jpg
 
Photodiva said:
Auto White Balance - my experience is that the floodlights cycle through different colors, so one shot may look different from another. I often 'tweak' shots for a bit of color balance after if they need it. Shoot raw if you feel the need.
Click to expand...

I agree. For football I always use auto white balance - with a custom you don't get consistent results because of the flood light cycles. I have expensive cameras with advanced computers in them - let them do the work.
 
I've yet to see a decent white balance shot from Anfield under floodlights .... some images much (much) worse than others (not even attempted to fix in post by the looks of things).... and certainly given the quality of some of the shooters I expect that the lights here could be some of the most challenging in the premiership ... never been myself ....
 
Thank you for all your advice. The football match was interesting to say the least. It was raining for the duration of the match which was something I've never had to deal with, so I improvised and used a plastic carrier bag to cover my lens and camera. Also, I did a silly thing, I was taking some photos in the bar area at half time and accidently left the image stabilisation for the duration of the second half. In the end I just used auto white balance, please bear in mind the only PP I have is windows live gallery (crop and sharpen).
Here's a few of the shots, as usual any comments welcome.
IMG_9274 by Ian Kendle, on Flickr[/IMG] IMG_9274[/URL] by Ian Kendle, on Flickr
IMG_9360 by Ian Kendle, on Flickr
IMG_9895 by Ian Kendle, on Flickr
 
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I was at Bromley tonight for the Kent Senior Cup match. Found the floodlights just a little challenging!
 
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