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 p.2 #2 · More Real Shoot Examples from D5 | |
I'll bet there isn't time to do a Custom WB in some cases... especially in cheer. I'm not making excuses for Paul, but having had a chance to see a cheer show where there were dedicated photographers up front, here's how I imagine that can happen.
An hour before the competition begins, the house is open. The "curtain lights" are on, making the stage back drop look pretty, while the competition floor remains dark and subdued. As a photographer, one could show up two hours before the show begins, but there is no guaranteeing that the lighting guys will do anything more than warm up the lights half way, before going to house "open" mode.
Then the first team is announced, runs onto the floor, and in 2 minutes, every kid needs to be shot several times with eyes open and face exposed while doing something that reasonably looks like cheering. Then the lights are off, and for 30 seconds there is time to chimp, swap cards, and now the next team is onstage needing to be shot.
Point being, for a pro competitive cheer photographer, there sometimes isn't even a chance to "see" the light before having to make saleable pictures in that light.
Exposure adjustments can be rolled around on the fly from frame to frame, and so can Kelvin. But Custom WB? As in shooting a grey card placed on stage? Ok, so where do you put that card, when stage left is 2 stops dimmer than stage right, with a 300 kelvin difference in temp due to the lamp age difference in the truss? Or upstage is different than down stage? Or up in the air is different than down on the mat?
At best, a kelvin temp is chosen, based on years of experience looking at what type and technology of light fixtures are hung, and how many of them are up there, and where and how they are pointed. In the first few frames, that best guess is fine tuned to provide the least of all evils, averaging every area of the stage as well as the air space above the stage where the flyers live, and then call it good, so that there is color consistency across all shots taken that the parents wade through on the view stations.
An Expo Disc could be used, but during the time spent dorking with an Expo disc in competition light, another $100 could have been made by shooting kids instead of Tupperware lids.
And even if a photographer broke down, buried their ego of being able to "handle it" on their own like a professional, and went over to the lighting guy and asked that the lights be turned on during a break to competition level temporarily just for purposes of creating a custom balance, thereby "breaking the proscenium arch" so to speak, violating the theatrical mystic experienced by the patrons, there STILL may be a variance from the Custom WB set, because the lighting board operator doesn't always move the slider up to the same level of power from team to team. It sort of depends on what YouTube video he or she is watching during the competition, as to how much attention they pay to what they are supposed to be doing.
Then, there are also lighting looks that vary on the fly... it is kind of trite, but believe it or not, some lighting designers will have green lights when a green uniform enters the stage, and then red lights when a red uniform enters the stage, and so on. In these cases, what would the value of a Custom white balance serve?
I'm actually asking... not arguing against. If there is an efficient way to get better color on the fly, beyond rolling kelvin around and bumping a click here and there on the color graph, I'd like to know how.
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