Sodium Vapor Lights – A solution?
Saturday, I had the opportunity to shoot a boy’s high school swim team under the unfortunate lighting circumstance of sodium vapor lights. If you’ve ever shot pictures you will know that this type of lighting produces a greenish hue and lack luster colors. It defies most efforts to adjust the white balance and the tints. A happy accident intervened however giving me an unexpectedly good result.
Image taken with Intensifier Filter with Auto White Balance – Uncorrected. |
Image taken with Auto White Balance – Uncorrected. |
The last time I was out shooting with my Canon 17-40 F4L lens I was shooting the waning remnants of fall colors here in Minnesota. I had placed upon the front of my lens a Hoya Intensifier filter to enhance the fall hues. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately in this case, I neglected to remove it until I discovered my mistake halfway through the shoot. When processing the RAW images in Lightroom I was pleasantly surprised to find the images before I realize the filter was in place were color temperature balanced much better than the images with no filter.
This turned out to be a happy accident and more testing is necessary to determine if this is a new technique I will be adopting or if it was a one-time deal but it does show promise in this unique instance.
Rikk Flohr © 2007
January 1, 2009 at 4:59 pm
[...] the pools where my son’s swim team practices and competes. The lighting, while dim, is also Sodium Vapor and doesn’t yield well to color balancing. I wrote about white balancing Sodium Vapor [...]