What to do? Tricky environment.

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dancook

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I shot a "Ladies Night" at an indoor leisure center.

I also had to continue continually alternating classes across multiple rooms across the center, allowing myself about 15 minutes in each location as not to miss anything out.

There was a hall with very active classes jumping, dancing, movement.
A swimming pool with particularly harsh lighting.
Another room which they turned off the lights for a spinning class.
One class was quite a spiritual relaxing class, I'm sure I heard a woman tell another '...weird...' - probably referring to me :) - A7S silent shutter mode on!

There was lots of fluorescent lighting throughout.


Certainly not ideal conditions, of which I did what I could within the time and constraints of the environment.

It did not seem appropriate to use flash, certainly not in a purposely darkened room or relaxing one.
In the halls, there isn't much to bounce off, high ceilings, large mirrors and windows.
I also would not want to distract the women that are probably trying to forget there's a man with a camera taking photos of them exercising.
There was some women that opted out of being photographed, we discussed positioning of them before the event started - which didn't happen because different people were leading classes and I wasn't necessarily there for the beginning, so had to work around them.

It leaves me wondering how other photographers would have tackled the situation?
 
sk66 said:
Not much to it if you can't use flash. Run the ISO up or let the images underexpose and fix in post... I would do both.
Click to expand...

I've made enough excuses not to use flash, I didn't know if someone would just use it anyway - it wasn't something I discussed with the client.

The other thing being fluorescent lighting, I read that you can shoot at the same frequency - but 1/50th would be too slow. So it was hit and miss that some of the photos were ruined by banding.

i did take the A7S out of silent shutter and disabled the EFC when I didn't need to be quiet. I'm not sure, but that might have helped.
 
For at least some of the images I would have given flash a go (hard to say without seeing any of the settings used). For this kind of stuff I use a large flashbender and the stock diffusion dome combined. When people are focused on other things they tend to ignore flash (as long as it's not blasted into their eyes).

I read that you can shoot at the same frequency - but 1/50th would be too slow
Click to expand...
Actually, you want your SS slower than the electrical cycle frequency when under fluorescents; so 1/50 was borderline fast. Using flash would have helped here as well (to freeze motion/ hide the color shifts).
 
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