bouncing of an " orange roof "

Hi,

I will be taking quite a lot of pics at an indoor event with a low , but orange , roof. Is it possible to " tell the camera " that the roof is orange , is it as simple as changing colour temperature or is there some other thread of research i should undertake. A search of the forum didnt yield much.

What is the rest of the lighting like (type, relative intensity to your flash bouncing off the ceiling, etc.)? How close are you going to be to the subjects?

Shoot it RAW and change later. This may work.

Hi,

The roof is low and uniformly one colour and the function room is quite big , maybe 3 feet above head level and the rest of the lighting appeared to be flouresecent with some tungsten thrown in around the edge of the room. The thing that struck me most about the place was the low orange roof and the walls being entirely brown tinted mirrors ( hence no good for bounce unless quite close ) . Basically it appears to be a bit of a nightmare , but at least a consistant one in terms of the even roof.

If you are going to take photos of people in this environment (and are not worried about the place itself too much for your images), I would use your Speedlites with a large "bounce card" (such as my LumiQuest Promax System with the white insert in the 80/20) and over-ride all the local lighting.

With the horrible mix of lighting and room colors, over-riding their conditions is the only way you that I can see for you to have some kind of normalcy to the lighting color in your images.

Why not bouce the flash off the ceiling and shoot a white/grey card for to set your white balance? Wouldn't that work?

Hinson

Hinson wrote in post #3851182
Why not bouce the flash off the ceiling and shoot a white/grey card for to set your white balance? Wouldn't that work?

Probably not...

The orange ceiling will absorb (to one degree or another) a lot of the colors that make up the light other than the colors that make up the orange (which, of course, are reflected). There's no recovering the light of the colors that get absorbed. When various color elements of the light are missing (or at least reduced significantly) from what was a full-spectrum light, you don't have the full spectrum of color left to illuminate other colored subjects properly.

That's why bouncing of photographic lighting should be done via a white, or at least color-neutral, surface.

If you were really lucky and the orange ceiling absorbed colors in a way that the reflected light emulated a tungsten light source, for example, the reflected light might be usable with white balance correction. Don't count on it, though.

Of course, the other problem that was described is the mixed types of lighting (fluorescent and tungsten) coupled with the orange ceiling. The mixed lighting is my reason for suggesting using direct flash (via a large local bounce card) to overpower the oddball-colored lighting in the facility.

Actually, bounce off a colored wall or ceiling can work, if you're careful. Attached is a shot of a potter taken at an art gallery openning. I bounced the flash off the red-orange walls to camera left, and used a custom white balance (but shot in RAW just in case). She came out fine, but if you look at the background you can see increasingly greenish casts as the flash fades out in the distance. The pole on the right is actually white.

If the distance to the subject changes, or if you change the mix of flash & available light, then the white balance will change, also.

Note on colors: I saved this file as sRGB without an imbedded profile, so it doesn't look exactly as it does on my calibrated system. The shirt really is white.

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Just use a bounce card - and corner lights angled down. Haven't done work w/an orange ceiling, but work often in 2 different location that have brown ceilings (YUCK!!!) Raw helps, that's all we shoot, but reflected light from an off color ceiling still affects skin tones. Be care ful not to drag your shutter much, as the color crossover in that enviroment will be a PIA.

orange is a dark color which will absorb most of your light... Technically, you COULD bounce the flash and adjust your WB accordingly, but this will be so inefficient it's not even funny. I wouldn't do it. Instead go with a more diffused direct light source, and if you have some tungsten available light to work with, maybe use a setting that will allow some of that to work for you. I personally would use a 3/4 CTO Rosco gel filter on the flash itself, and set my camera up for about 3300 degrees K. That's just me though.

Hmmm, I have a red wall that I used for some experimenting one time and found the results to be horrible. The color cast on my subjects was bad and almost impossible to get completely rid of. I agree with the others of using bounce cards.

Dial in a higher ratio of ambient light and use direct flash. Contrary to popular myth, direct flash is not a sin if you know how to control it. The key is in the RATIO of light.

I've shot in places with BLACK matte roofs that reflect nearly ZERO light with direct flash and got almost the same results as I did with my usual bounce card!

Or find a way to use the orange to your advantage. Another place where I regularly used to shoot had very nice wood ceilings. Far from being a disaster, it yielded some very nice warm toned shots, almost as good as me putting a gel on the flash.

For more information, read Strobist's latest lesson about controlling ambient light. We've been told "bounce the flash" for so long it is counter intuitive to use hard light, but again, it's all in the ratio. The secret is instead of bouncing the flash and contaminating the light with the color of the ceiling, you are using as much available light as possible to light the background, while using your direct flash for just a hint of fill-in lighting to illuminate just your subject. It would be the same as using a spotlight to highlight a performer, rather than splashing the light everywhere.

thank you all for so much feedback. It has allowed me direct my studies and preperation.

Best answer is don't do it. Will save lots of computer work if you just shoot straight on with a soft box on your flash or maybe a Gary Fong lighsphere II with the white dome on that puts out the white light instead of bouncing the orange light. Other wise you will be doing color changes and kinds of other things that is unnecessary. The photo above with the orange walls, if you notice there is green in the hair on top of the head, indicates flourescent lights etc....shoot straight on with a softbox.