I shoot a lot of youth soccer and two of my favorite teams have all white uniforms. I find it very challenging to expose in these situations; invariably the uniforms are overexposed even when the image overall is well underexposed. Shooting to the right of course makes it even worse. Seems that this occurs in a wide variety of lighting situations, dim to bright sunlight.
I am interested in other experiences with this type of situation. Do you forget about the uniforms? What metering mode do you use? Do you find more success in manual or do you prefer AV?
I have a lot of experience with AV and using exposure comp but have been playing around with manual; I seem to get more consistency in shot exposure since I can see in the meter if I am drastically under or overexposed, something that is harder to determine in AV, unless you chimp frequently.
In youth soccer they are not wearing helmets so it should be easy as faces are not in shadows like baseball/softball etc. Some white will get over blown, I wouldn't worry too much. I would prefer proper exposure on the faces. You can do some adjustments in pp or raw conversion.
Here are couple from this weekend. Shot in manual mode, no pp.
White uniforms are white. In direct sunlight, stand there, look at a white uniform and your eyes will see it as blown out. So, if you expose correctly for faces, then if the uniform is blown out or not, that is secondary.
Second Carl's point - white is white, as long as you still see texture (folds, wrinkles, etc which you do in the above shots then move on. Skin tones are a lot more important than a white uni looking ... too white if there even is such a thing.
I just don't find that I loose much sleep with white unis that are blown out.
If it bothers you, however, you probably need to give serious consideration to the question of what's more important...properly exposed white unis, or the faces of those you're trying to shoot. Personally, I chose the faces every time.
I shoot a lot of soccer and lacrosse teams with white jerseys. As everyone else has suggested, expose for faces/skin and understand that you will probably blow out whites depending on light at the moment. Under bright sun, with white jerseys, and shooting in Manual mode, I always overexpose by at least +1/3 and sometimes +2/3. Take a few shots and check your histogram. While the histogram may not be totally accurate you will get a sense of what your images will look like in reference to the histogram on your particular camera.
I bet they'll have some ideas.