So I had a very unpleasant discovery with regards to fluorescent lighting a weekend or so ago, while hanging out with DrFantastic…

I almost completely forgot about this newfound knowledge until last night, when I was photographing a gymnastics meet with my new D300. I was very excited to be able to finally have f/2.8 and a clean ISO 1600 / 3200 at my disposal; I thought my slow shutter speed blur woes were over!

It took 0.5 seconds for everything to come crashing down. (3 frames at 6 frames per second…) What the HECK is he talking about, you might think to yourself? Well here are those three frames, shot at a glorious, action-stopping 1/500 sec…

D300 auto white balance has some SERIOUS issues, you say? Nope.

You see those gas tube lights are powered by AC electricity, and so the ACTUAL light alternates with a sine wave that is about 60 hz for the US, and 50 hz for Europe. Well, what’s a HZ, you ask? The short answer that doesn’t make your head hurt: it’s a hundredth of a second. So yep, 60 hz is 1/60 sec, for simplicity’s sake. That means that if you shoot at a shutter speed faster than 1/60 sec, your picture will NOT include a full cycle of the light’s alternating current. If you go TOO fast, like 1/500 sec as I have done here, it becomes a complete image-killer.

As I was saying, that’s just fantastic.

At any rate, I plowed through the event nonetheless, shooting mostly at around 1/125 sec. to 1/250 sec. At these shutter speeds some of the images come out perfect, but you have to catch the frequency just right. Some of the images will be trash however, and you just have to shoot a LOT… Which I did, 1200 images and 8 gigs later. And I was only focusing on like 3 client’s kids too, not the whole event. So that’s like 400 images per kid, or 100 images per kid per event. And each events last just a few seconds per kid. So yeah, I guess you could say I was “blazing”…

Shooting theater this coming week, under CONSTANT source light, is going to feel like a breeze now. LOL, an I used to think it was so difficult. Actually out of everything I shoot professionally, children’s theater is quite possibly the most fun because it is 100% pure emotion, action and fun, while at the same time being one of the MOST technically demanding conditions that photography has to offer…

=Matt=