Wedding White Balance

[Stephie]

Do you all use a grey card when you shoot weddings?

Or do you set your white balance by zooming in on the brides gown?

OR set it in one of the modes set by the camera?

And if you do set it, how often do you have to change it? do you set it once for teh ceremony, and then again for each scene, or do you just adjust for each shot?

Twenty Questions...sorry:rolleyes:

[elysium]

Shoot away in RAW if grey card is unavailable to situation keeps changing. WB is much easier to adjust with RAW.

You should reall have a custom white balance for every scene when it changes. With RAW, it can save you those few minutes when shooting constantly.

[Zansho]

I don't always have the luxury of setting my white balance when situations change. Hence why I shoot in raw. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, that's just the reality of the whole wedding shoot - very fast paced and not always catering to the photographer.

[stathunter]

I started using a grey card for weddings and like it. For me it makes the white balance easier to do a bulk change. I typically shoot AWB and make the changes in pp. And yes I am a RAW shooter.

[sapearl]

Hi Stephanie - I use one of those 20" round collapsible Lastolite Ezybalance gray card devices:

http://www.lastolite.com/ezybalance.php

Since a bride's "white" gown can be a variety of different shades of white, cream, etc. I like to have some standard reference point in my shots. Throughout the day I will include this card in a number of different scenes that would be characteristic of the different shooting environs and types of lighting. I shoot RAW and have the 5D set for AWB. Per the manual, the 5D prefers a WHITE card, so I'll use that side of the Ezybalance.

After the job I dump everything into ACR, and then "eyedropper" the white card to get a proper color temperature. I mean tweak a little bit and use my own judgement for a final determination, but this works extremely well for my workflow.

[Dermit]

Another vote for shooting in RAW and asjusting in post. Nice thing about most weddings as you usually do have a white dress, and/or black suit. It's pretty easy to find a neutral tone.

[sapearl]

Totally agree with you Scott about performing "global changes."

Once you set your exposure for a whole run of shots, say 5, 10 or 20 or more that have been captured under identical lighting characteristics, it's very fast an easy to properly adjust one representative shot, and then apply all those WB characteristics to the remaining images in the sequence. This is a terrific timesaver.

I started using a grey card for weddings and like it. For me it makes the white balance easier to do a bulk change. I typically shoot AWB and make the changes in pp. And yes I am a RAW shooter.

[Shooting]

Or take a white sheet of paper and set it at the altar and shoot the front of the church as you normally would during groups, etc..then you have a reference of white to use the white eyedropper with.

Shoot that paper in every scene and then don't worry about it.