Custom White Balance

Hi,

I am shooting pictures next week at my nephew's wedding. Let me start out saying they have hired a professional, I am just taking pictures as you normally do at any occassion. I've mainly shoot football and baseball during the day and not too familiar with taking pictures in-doors. When setting the custom white balance (and if you plan on using the flash indoors) do you need to take the intitial picture with the flash on or off ?

The flash should be on. But it gets to be complicated depending on how far away your subject is, how strong your flash is, what the other sources of light are, what ISO you use, if you'll be taking pictures at different distances and in different locations inside, etc.

Shooting in RAW would allow you to easily adjust the white balance in post processing and you wouldn't have to worry as much about all the variation (if such things worry you that much ).

Edit: just noticed your 85mm f/1.8 lens in your gear list. With that lens you probably could bump ISO up and shoot without flash at all, making white balance a bit simpler.

I only do custom white balance when I shoot ambient light only....and that's rare.

You should definitely shoot in RAW so you don't need to be worried about this during wedding and leave WB on Auto and later to tweak WB in Camera RAW.
I would consider buying of whibal card (the smallest one is not that expensive) and it's always good to have it (it will streamline your post processing).

Good luck.

lukas

lukasgunar wrote in post #4032165
You should definitely shoot in RAW so you don't need to be worried about this during wedding and leave WB on Auto and later to tweak WB in Camera RAW.
I would consider buying of whibal card (the smallest one is not that expensive) and it's always good to have it (it will streamline your post processing).

Good luck.

lukas

You could do that, or just get a grey card and cut it down to a smaller pocketable size.

I have the whibal and never use it. The grey card does the same thing and was far less expensive.