I’m looking for some thoughts or suggestions on how to better capture or light the following situation.

I’m currently shooting a local county fair, with cattle shows in a large arena. I’m having some trouble getting good images out of the camera, and I really, really, don’t want to have to post process a bunch of these after the fact.

I’m sure I’m missing or forgetting something, and was hoping someone could tell me what it is. To give you an idea, It’s a medium sized indoor area, with:

1. Natural light spilling in at various times of the day in varying intensity from large doors on all sides but north.

2. Natural lighting from windows were the walls meet the roof.

3. Multiple sky lights of old yellowed and dirty plastic high up.

4. Quite a few lower hanging banks of florescent tube lights.

5. Add to this yellowish pine shavings on the floor, from which I’m pretty sure I’m getting a color cast.

6. And a never ending thick cloud of dust as the cows move about that diffuses the light.

7. And a third of the cows are jet black and a third crème or white colored.

8. As night comes, all that is left is the fluorescents, but by this time the dust cloud is very thick.

9. Champion shots are posed on the shavings, in front of a crème colored wall, a glossy (reflective) finish sign with the fair’s name on it, hangs above them.

911 Chuck, 911…………

I’ve tried with and without on camera flash, flash tried in various modes, tried the white balance set at either AWB of Florescent, which seems to work about the same, ISO in the 400/500 range to give me sufficient shutter speed to capture the motion, shooting with a 1DII, and primarily with a 70-200 2.8, or 24-70, though the example was with a 17-40 to show the lighting elements. I thought about trying a custom white balance, and I have an expo disk as well as a pop up 18% grey disk, but didn’t have them today. I'm sure a custom WB can’t hurt, but not sure if it will help with the color cast.

What am I missing?

but out of the camera, they need some work..........

examples

I feel for you Sam. Arena photography rates right up there with high school football. Sorry I can't be more help, but I was a miserable failure at both.

Good luck.

You did a good job describing the environment. Also, your wide shot demonstrates the various colors of the light sources. You're correct that you're fighting the yellow shavings on the floor, they are reflecting a significant amount of light on your subjects.

It's a tossup whether or not setting a custom white balance would help, but I always want a reading of what I'm dealing with. If you find you've left your WB tools at home, you can always be inventive. You may not get the same accuracy, but reading off a fairly neutral target like notebook paper or even a styrofoam cup might prove useful. You'd have to take readings throughout the day and evening as the light mix changes .

I'm not sure on camera flash gains you much. As you've pointed out, you've already got a mixture of three different light sources (unfiltered daylight, fluorescent and daylight filtered through yellowed skylights). By using flash you introduce a fourth color temperature to the mix. The venue is just too big to overpower the ambient light. The only time I think flash would be of use would be for the Champion shots, but with the reflective sign behind them, you really need off camera flash and I don't know if you have that capability.

Post processing can be a lot less onerous with the right software. I use Lightroom 2.x and I almost always shoot Raw. I also try to take a reference frame with a WhiBal card. In LR, it can read the WhiBal card with the eyedropper and set a neutral WB. I may tweak away from that slightly, for instance I like a slightly warmer than neutral setting for people shots. I can then save the settings for that photo as a custom setting and easily apply it to the other photos in the session.

Your long shots look a little flat and underexposed. It may be the dust. Were these shot JPEG? If so, what mode?

Your venue is not conducive to getting good results. You may be limited in the amount you can improve the photos with the equipment at hand.

Mixed lighting situations are always difficult because there is no ideal way to capture the image in the camera in a way that mimics how our perception adapts to the same lighting in person.

When faced with a scene with more contrast than the camera can handle the best approach perceptually is to identify what in the photo is most important and expose it correctly in the photo, then try to compose the photo in a way any blown highlights or lost shadow detail isn't noticed. The same thing works perceptually with color balance. If we get the skintones in portraits, or known "reference" colors in the foreground of non-portrait shots close to normal, then the fact the background doesn't match isn't really noticed much. If we combine that perception based color strategy with shallow DOF and tonal gradient to isolate the correctly balanced foreground from the off color background it will also encourage the viewer's brain to tune out the background.

So in your wide shot of the arena where the eye will key more off the background than the people you could find a neutral tone in the photo, and when editing the RAW file "click to neutral" with the eye dropper. That will not make everything correct in the technical sense of WB, but it will mimic the way you perception would react to the same light in person. The goal isn't to render the scene accurately, but rather to make it seem "real" in the photo.

In the close-up shots of the kids you'd want to do the same technique, but balance on the white bibs and the faces which will be what the viewer of the reproduced image will key off sub-consciously to determine if the image looks "normal". In situations where you are that close it is possible to use flash one of two ways: unfiltered with WB set to match the flash, or using a filter on the flash to match the dominant ambient source with Custom WB set to the filtered flash so the predominantly flash lit faces in the foreground will be neutral.

If one is willing to take the time in post processing mixed lighting can be remedied by making several copies of the RAW file, one for each light source in the image, balance one for each source, then blend them together with masks. It is actually simpler than it sounds. The dominant source layer is put on the bottom and the others are blended in as needed to reduce the color casts seen in it. I used that technique for a set of photos I took to document the hospitality crew at my church. The kitchen was well lit with fluorescents, but the angle of the light on the faces wasn't flattering. So I opted to use flashes, for key/fill/background as the baseline, then used layer blending to correct the color in the background or from other sources in the photos like the hot table lamps on the food. You can see the photos HERE.

When shooting performance rehearsals and other stage presentations where flash is allowed I will gel my flashes with 1/2 CTO and balance to the gelled light. 1/2 CTO is orange. Its not an exact match intentionally, so more of the "ambience" in the ambient light will show. The process starts by setting custom WB off a grey card using the gelled flash.

Carmen Miranda, Dmacmillan, Chuck

I came home at lunch and saw your responces, thank you very much for the quick replies.

I'm going to print them out and run back to the ring in a few minutes and try to absorb it, it should help tremendously.

This morning I broke out the expo disk, as they were already in full swing when I rolled in, and set a custom white ballence, though I confess I havent used it since I bought it, you know, got caught up in the hype years ago and had to have one, only never took the proper time to learn exactly how to use it, as it only came with a one page instruction sheet.

If I was using it correctly, I snapped it on the 24-70, aimed it at the primary light source, which in this case I think was the floresent tubes, as the main doors were closed, adjusted exposure, and then used that to set a custom balance. The photos after seemed better to my eye, and the histogram for the most part seemed good. Some out the camera resized for here are attached. I also tried a few switching between evaluative and spot metering, as most of the kids here were wearing white ring clothes, though some times it seemed to spike the meter as they got closer, and was a little more problematic, so I went back to evaulative. I also tried adding in a little flash on camera, with an old lightsphere, flash set in manual at like 1/16 or 1/34 or something like that, trying to fight some of the issues with lack of depth, shooting in the 3.5 to 4. range.

I'll be back at it in an hour, but have 9, yes NINE more days to work on the technique.

Thanks again,

Sam

Also,

dmacmillan, I shot most RAW + L, camera set in standard, level 8, srgb, no in camera sharpening or NR, but I've never realy been sure either way on the NR or In-camera sharpening settings. The dust wasnt as bad as it was only the start of the day, the animals alot smaller than big bulls, though the kids do drag their feet alot, and i only thought my kids did that.

I'm going to try the white card as well, as after re-reading all of Chucks posts last week in preparation, I bought a collapsible reversable 20" lastolite disk, though after carting it around, I think I may have bought one size to big. Will try it out in few minutes.

Chuck, I hadnt thought about the gell for the stage work, and I have four days were that will come into play, so I will see if I can find some orange gell here in town in the next day or two. I also thought about mounting all my ABees up on the walls, and fireing them with wizards, but dont want to start a stampede, or spend all my time worry about the equipment walking off, instead of enjoying the creative and fun part of capture.

Sam

The example images you are posting here would all benefit greatly from some basic post processing. Just open the ones you posted and apply "Adjustments > Auto Color".

Auto-Color works like AWB, snapping the brightest highlights to neutral. It seldom produces a perfect result but is a good way to get a "by the numbers" second opinion of color and contrast in the file. The two are related. A color case will reduce contrast. Often when the color is corrected the overall image contrast also improves.

Try it, you'll see the difference

Chuck