White balance at gigs

RichyX

I'm going to a gig tonight and taking the SLR for the first time.

I've searched the internet but I haven't been able to find any info on how to set the white balance for gigs.

The venue has the usual assortment of coloured lighting.

Is there a correct setting for gigs?

Stephen

Dunno about that, but you could shoot raw and fix the white balance afterwards on your computer?

RichyX

Stephen wrote:

you could shoot raw and fix the white balance afterwards on your computer?

That's a bit impractical when shooting a gig.
The write time for RAW (on my K100D at least) is too long to make it viable for capturing lots of shots of the action.

Zillah

Set it to automatic and blast away. That or tungsten. Unless this is a commissioned job there really is no need to fret.

mdebets

I don't know, which DSLR you are using, but my 350D has no problems with shooting continuous in RAW.
If you can only shoot JPEG, you could try Lightroom (The 30 days test version). It can handle white balance corrections for JPEGs as well.

Stephen

My D50 seems to write RAW to a 2GB SD card very fast too.

melekalikimaka

its culls the old buffer big time shooting in raw tho, i rather have the extra ten or so shots

Zillah

Plus, this isn't a wedding. You don't need to capture the perfect dazzling whites of the Bride's dress or anything. A gig is likely to be drenched in multicoloured light anyway, a perfect white balance is not neccessary. If you shoot in jpeg on auto WB and a shot comes out a little too orange/blue whatever then its very easy to change the colour balance slightly. You don't need RAW to adjust colours.

DotOrg

i leave my camera on auto WB for all live gigs & fix any colour issues afterwards and nobody seems to complain too much about my live shots

magicbastarder

i would have thought that with coloured lights, you'd want to avoid auto white balance, so it doesn't try to fix wildly colourful lighting, and just getting confused?

Fajitas!

Depends on the lights.

If I get there early, I'll ask what the lighting is gonna be like. If it's stable enough, I'll go for custom WB, otherwise Auto is grand.

DotOrg

the lighting is always changing and they use combinations of tungsten, halogen and strobes at most gigs so the colour temp never stays the same anyway.

if you're shooting digital it's so easy to fix afterwards anyway

Fajitas!

Lol...This is thread of the day...