White Balance for Speedlight + Other Light Sources

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Stoneage Romeo

New member
Hi all,
I've got a query about white balance when using a speedlight where there are various other light sources ie. how do you get around different colour temps from different light sources, specifically daylight, tungsten and flash?

I am doing a wedding next month in which both the ceremony and the reception are to be held upstairs in an old pub. There are several large windows, but there is also very warm tungsten lighting in the room and I will also be using my SB-700 speedlight. I experimented with manually setting the white balance using the mix of tungsten and window light, using tungsten light only and then putting it on auto WB, and I wasn't really happy with any of the results. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
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WayneF

Senior Member
Mixed lighting is a big problem. Really only a couple of ways to try to handle it.

You can use enough flash power to overwhelm the ambient lighting by 2 or 3 stops, and then use flash white balance (which itself varies with flash power level). Then the rest is too dim to matter much (if underexposed). Works best with a near background. Because inverse square law makes the flash power trail off, and then a distant background will still be another WB.

Or if only one type of "other light", you can use color filters on the flash to make it match the tungsten or fluorescent lighting, and use WB to match it. But the filter can only match one type of other light.

Sunshine is about the same WB as flash, except window light is more like shade, and more blue.

In non-mixed cases, we can use a white balance card in a test picture, and set WB correction from that, but in mixed lighting, it will only match that one spot, not the rest of the area. The incandescent will be stronger some places, and the windows stronger others... So this will work better if the flash is stronger and the ambient is somewhat underexposed.

There are some good links here:
mixed lighting white balance - Google Search
 
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RocketCowboy

Senior Member
WayneF does a better job than me, so I'll just try to simplify my understanding. Flash is matched to natural daylight , so if mixing with other light sources I'd try to gel the flash to match the other sources. I picked up a small gel kit to get started, but haven't done much practical yet.
 
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rocketman122

Senior Member
Stoneage Romeo said:
Hi all,
I've got a query about white balance when using a speedlight where there are various other light sources ie. how do you get around different colour temps from different light sources, specifically daylight, tungsten and flash?

I am doing a wedding next month in which both the ceremony and the reception are to be held upstairs in an old pub. There are several large windows, but there is also very warm tungsten lighting in the room and I will also be using my SB-700 speedlight. I experimented with manually setting the white balance using the mix of tungsten and window light, using tungsten light only and then putting it on auto WB, and I wasn't really happy with any of the results. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

youre in a very difficult situation. you dont have good shooting conditions and it warrants too much on your part to try to neutralize it. the only thing Id do is use some ocf flash where I can and also the one on my camera and get face tones correct. nothing else is as important. you must tell the GB your situation. AWB in the cameras suck ass. they arent accurate and youd best just keep it to the 5000k mark or less. people will have shades of yellow around them. shoot raw so you can tweak the WB later. if youre in sniping mode and shooting with no flash, bring it down to 2500-2800 or so as you need. the higher you up the iso the more youre capturing ambient yellow light. although id prefer it to the flashed look with black surrounding. this situation really needs some skills
 
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