Camera went nuts white balance comes and goes

[R_Fredrick_Smith]

Try keeping the shutter speed to 1/30th of a second and you'll get rid of the WB consistency problem. You'll probably need a tripod for doing this for good sharpness. Check the CRI of the bulbs. Need to try for at least 80 or higher.

Here is one of my flourescent shots:


Cheers,
rfs

[n5wd]

Roger's answer has you started in the right direction.

We use a eight-tube/four-fixture square of flourescent lights all the time in my studio, and with great success. Here's an example:



That's Serena. The trick to working with flourescents is to remember that they're not continuous lights... they derive their cost savings by flickering on and off rapidly, unlight a hot light that is pumping out light all of the time. Thus, as you catch a flourescent at a different point in it's lighting cycle, you may wind up with a bit different light than the shot before. With a hot light, they're pretty well constant.

So, set your shutter speed slower than the flicker rate (which is 60 Hz) and shoot at 1/50th or slower. You should see a change in the consistency of the color of the light.. even moreso if you'll drop down to 1/30th for your shutter speed.

Here's another example:



I also shoot with 512MB cards.. I can get 50 RAW shots on one card. I shoot RAW so that I have complete control over the look of the image and can easily fine-tune the flourescent lighted image into one that looks just as warm as anything else you'll find out there.

Hope that helps...

Wayne
RWDPhotography

Aww.. what the heck.. here's one more of my gallery of flourescent lit ladies. This is Andy:

[jford]

I can't say, David. I know that these bulbs are richer in blue than ordinary tubes, but I don't know much more. I seem to recall that there are now "daylight" fluorescent tubes that are much better than the regular ones, but I don't know how well aquarium tubes, plants tubes, or even the "lizard" tubes emulate daylight.

The real problem is that fluorescent bulbs output some spikes of energy in the green. Because they're spikes, adjusting the curves in PS doesn't work too well - the curves give a smooth correction. In principle, a clever programmer could create a better correction - probably has, but I don't know about it.

I suggest you try something like this: get a nice piece of white card stock, or white foam core, go into a nice, sunny environment and do a manual white balance on it. Get properly exposed images of, e.g., a Macbeth board, or some other similar object with a variety of simple color blocks.

Set up your fluorescent system, do your white balance on the same white card stock, and get properly exposed images of your checker. Now you can use PS to look at the RGB values of the checker under fluorescents and find adjustments to give values as similar as possible to the RGB values of the checker in sunlight.

Caveat - this suggestion is possibly completely worthless and undoubtedly a lot of work. It's based on my knowledge of light, spectra, and diode array spectrometers. And a smattering of poor understanding of color photography.

Ya' know, Dave - I THINK you can buy plastic filters - tubes - that fit over a fluorescent tube. Adding say +25 or +30 of magenta ought to help a bit. I just found this information on the web, which - in a quick glance - looks pretty good. Better than my poor explanation, anyway.

[DavidMoyle]

Wow, I have a headache, I shouldn't have read this at 10:45 PM!

[NetMap]

wow thanks everyone i about to give some of your suggestions a try I will report back. oh but it 6:30am and i think i will be catching that sun rise. I will post the results later today

[NetMap]

okay The correction
1. I did not try to custom white balance. I was using a gray card then setting the white blalnce.
2. I replaced my tubes with 5000K tubes There is a setting forr 5000k on my camera.
3. I got on my knees and prayed to the color God that every thing would work and it did.

I may have to step up to better camera but I will work on my compostion a bit before i do that