I met Samuli for the first time a few months ago, because I was shooting a photo series of one of his art crafts, the citybird. The citybird is a sculpture made of a piece of naturally shaped ancient rock with feet and head made of bronze, and it looks like, well, a bird. Samuli started crafting citybirds some ten years ago, and the first one was sold to a Swiss family that visited the workshop in 2003. During the past ten years the citybird has become Samuli’s most popular piece of art and at times demand exceed Samuli’s production capacity. Samuli offered me coffee and introduced me to the craft. The birds are characterized by beautiful craftsmanship, lines and shapes, and each of them has something very special and personal. Samuli had two birds ready and I took them with me to the studio. I had no experience of how to shoot this kind subject. The shapes of the craft were interesting and called for a simple lighting setup with one or a maximum of two lights. I felt I wanted to do a low key setup and put the bird on black acrylic plate. The lighting was very simple, one striplight and a reflector, and a background light for some shots. Since I had two birds I thought of making a sequence of pictures that would make up little story. I wrapped the pics into a quick slideshow:

But let’s get back to the other day. Arriving at the workshop, we were offered some coffee and had a chat, and after two cups we started to setup the light. For a first setup we’d use flash without ambient, with one softbox to the left, a speedlight in the room behind Samuli and one speedlight on the floor to illuminate the brick arch on the right.

Photo courtesy of Felix Peter (www.felixpeter.com)

I like the text on the blackboard that says “Tervetuloa”, because that is what you feel like when visiting the workshop, “welcome”.

Next we decided to use ambient light and add some light with a simple low budget light torch (Felix’s specialty). This introduces some white balance problems but overall allowed us to better retain the ambiance of hot iron and sparks.

At the end a few staged sparring shots:

Here’s an example of two subsequent  shots (unprocessed originals):

The background in the first picture is yellowish, while in the second it is more neutral. The kickboxers in the foreground, however, have the same color both. Here’s another example:

Here both the background (the door and reflection in the mirror, which is behind me) have a cast in the first pic, the second again is more neutral.

So what is it? The camera WB was set to fluorescent, but within a fraction of a second it gives me two different results. While chimping (looking the result on the LCD) I noticed it and was confused at first. I did not bother about it too much, as fixing WB is not such a problem. But then I noticed that in some pics the color cast applies only to a part of the pic, and that’s more tricky. After some more confusion I remembered. Those darn neon lights…

Neon (fluorescent) lights  flicker at about twice the frequency of the current feeding them, meaning that an entire flicker cycle will be between 1/100 and 1/120 second. During such a cycle the light’s intensity and color temperature changes.  Using a shutter speed  faster than that, as I did, then that’s exactly what happens. I was using shutter speeds between 1/400 and 1/800, and in almost every sequence of frames shot in a row (at 9 fps), I have at least one with a color cast.

A possibility to overcome that problem is to shoot with flash at shutter speed slower than 1/100. Here an example shot at 1/20 with bounced flash bounced:

The other option is that you don’t bother, hoping the good shots have no cast, and if they have, fix them.  Black & white conversion does the job too: