White balance and harsh light

A couple of questions for you fellow Motorsport types to ponder.

I was wondering how you all white balance your Motorsport shots? Do you just stick it on AWB, set a custom white balance or white balance each shot using the eye dropper?

Secondly, last week at Donington, the light was horrible. Harsh, bright sunlight. Shooting through the fence wasn't great, and my images looked rather washed out.

How do you overcome this? My first thought was to use a polarising filter, but I'm not sure if that would trash my image quality.

Here is a link to my Flickr album from last week to give you an idea what I mean.

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmx2ry1m

Ta!

The answer is simple - underexpose by at least a stop and also check your histogram and blinkies.

I just did a quick and dirty edit using EasyHDR3:

PhotoBoris said:

A couple of questions for you fellow Motorsport types to ponder.

I was wondering how you all white balance your Motorsport shots? Do you just stick it on AWB, set a custom white balance or white balance each shot using the eye dropper?

Secondly, last week at Donington, the light was horrible. Harsh, bright sunlight. Shooting through the fence wasn't great, and my images looked rather washed out.

How do you overcome this? My first thought was to use a polarising filter, but I'm not sure if that would trash my image quality.

Here is a link to my Flickr album from last week to give you an idea what I mean.

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmx2ry1m

Ta!

Click to expand...

Hi Gary,

Most of the time, I use AWB and shoot in raw. Any issues I simply correct during post processing, but to be honest they are few and far between. However, if I'm using an ND filter to slow my shutter speed down on a bright day, then I'll set a custom WB with the filter in place using something like an Expodisc. It has always worked well for me in the past.

There's not much you can do if you have fences to shoot through on a very bright day. The fences themselves are what is causing the contrast loss. I would avoid using a polarizing filter, as it can give you weird rainbow effects on cars that aren't running with glass windscreens. Again being honest, I'll simply avoid shooting through the fence on a really bright day. However, if you have to (and even on an overcast day), shooting raw and then using the dehaze slider in Lightroom can result in a huge improvement. If I'm shooting JPEGs, then I'll increase the contrast on the picture style (Canon shooter here) for the during that I'm shooting through the fence.

Hope this helps.

Simon.

PhotoBoris said:

A couple of questions for you fellow Motorsport types to ponder.

I was wondering how you all white balance your Motorsport shots? Do you just stick it on AWB, set a custom white balance or white balance each shot using the eye dropper?

Secondly, last week at Donington, the light was horrible. Harsh, bright sunlight. Shooting through the fence wasn't great, and my images looked rather washed out.

How do you overcome this? My first thought was to use a polarising filter, but I'm not sure if that would trash my image quality.

Here is a link to my Flickr album from last week to give you an idea what I mean.

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmx2ry1m

Ta!

Click to expand...

This is nothing to do with white balance what so ever. It's about contrast.

White balance I generally just set to to the camera presets according to the whether, but I do also fix it in lightroom afterwards sometimes.

shapeshifter said:

This is nothing to do with white balance what so ever. It's about contrast.

Click to expand...

I wasn't suggesting it was. If you re-read my post, I was asking two seperate questions, one about white balance and one about contrast.

Sadly shooting through the fence is always going to cause you some issues, as although you can make it "disappear" with a long lens and wide aperture it's still affecting how the light hits your sensor. Looking at your Flickr images they don't look too bad. If you use Lightroom I would make some small adjustments to the Dehaze slider to get a bit of contrast back in, and also adjust your tone curve to gain some contrast as well. As for white balance, I just leave mine on auto and shoot raw, I can adjust the WB after the fact then if I find an image that's way off. To be honest the camera does a pretty good job, I don't usually touch the WB slider.