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Posted by nobody special on 08/18/06 05:07
This question reminds me of the old old joke:
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
"Well, don't DO that!"
ND gel on the window bank with color correction to incandescent-type
color temp would have cost you hundreds for windows that large, and
everybody looking at them without a camera to their eye would have
found them objectionable. You probably would not have gotten permission
to put them up anyway.
You could have balanced to the light coming in the windows, then added
an HMI spotlight or two indoors for fill, bringing up the interior
level. This makes the bulk of the light all the same color and
decreases the blown-out backlighting, but is also ruinously expensive,
gobbles power at a horrific rate, and would tend to blind and dazzle
everybody attending. Plus, it ruins the intimate mood necessary for
dancing. Putting a blue color-correcting gel on your tungsten on-camera
light is only practical for shooting very close-up, as the gel kills
your output drastically.
A gradient gray filter on the lens would maybe help a little when
shooting with the windows on your left shoulder and the regula lighting
on the right, but this would have been awkward to use all day with
shifting camera positions. No filter is truly going to help you much
with direct backlighting, except maybe an Infra-Red:-)
If it was me, I would have shot with my back to the windows at all
times, then I would only have had to contend with a daylight versus
overhead incandescent color situation. Balancing to the daylight
directly would mean the house lights would add a reddish cast but
depending on the severity of this, it can look "romantic" in context of
a wedding. For close-up work, an incandescent (tungsten) on-camera
light would override the general funky color and make normal-looking
pics where it counts. If there is ceiling height to use, you can raise
the tripod column extra-high and kill much of the backlighting because
you show less sky and more ground thru the windows. However, it's no
way to shoot the entire gig.
One trick you can try is to fool your camera by manually
white-balancing it on a white card that is reflecting a mix of *both*
types of light. This sort of "splits the difference" between the two
colors. None of the shots will be perfectly balanced, but the should be
in a range of being color-correctable in post-production at that point.
On the pro cams I use, you can set two different whites in memory and
pop between them at will. I usually set one for indoor and one for
outdoor.
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