Light to dark banding. LED lighting perhaps? Mirrorless vs DSLR

[Me²]

I agreed to shoot a wedding for a family friend recently. It was absolute last minute and I completely winged it with a Nikon Z5 combo I'd literally just got. It absolutely hammered it down all day so 99% of the shots I took were indoors and suffer from extreme changes in ambient light amount and colour. There's also significant light to dark banding/shadowing on many of the shots. I've pretty casually and successfully photographed a decent number of weddings before with a pair of D700s and later, D750's without ever having come across anything like this before. My first guess is that I've miraculously managed to avoid a venue with predominantly LED lighting before now and the colour and lighting changes are due to the shutter speed vs frequency of the lighting rapidly switching on and off with the mains supply BUT is there any reason why a DSLR might not be effected as much as a Mirrorless camera by this? Something to do with shutter type perhaps?

I managed to compensate on the day by slowing my shutter speed down, but that really wasn't an ideal solution as it took away my ability to use bigger apertures or capture moving people with on point sharpness. Now I have a proper, paid wedding coming up and I'm suddenly really worried! I've contacted the venue to find out what sort of lighting I can expect if it's again bad weather, but they're not being massively helpful so am heading over this weekend as I'm thinking about holding my hands up, refunding the deposit and just telling the couple what the issue is for me and that they're frankly better off finding a more competent, and likely more expensive, pro whilst they still have plenty of time to play with.

I can't think of any other solution, other than dropping shutter speed, that doesn't stiff me impacting creative control of images using aperture and shutter speed. Anyone any suggestions or similar experiences?

 

[ancient_mariner]

I'm sure that every kind of camera, film included would be affected by LED lighting at higher shutter speeds. I'll leave some of the pros to comment on how they mitigate it, but an obvious option for images outside the service is to bring your own light source with a flash head or 2, preferably used off camera.

 

[TCR4x4]

Electronic shutters seem to experience banding more than mechanical at all shutter speeds. Something To do with the way the image is read off the sensor.

 

[Garry Edwards]

I'm sure that every kind of camera, film included would be affected by LED lighting at higher shutter speeds. I'll leave some of the pros to comment on how they mitigate it, but an obvious option for images outside the service is to bring your own light source with a flash head or 2, preferably used off camera.

Yes. Problems are inevitable with any kind of pulsing light source and of course there are likely to be other problems with discontinuous spectrum lighting sources such as LED and the obvious answer is to use fairly powerful portable flash, bounced off the ceiling to emulate the normal lighting conditions.

I can't think of any obvious reason why the problem would be worse with mirrorless but wonder whether you used a high ISO setting which allowed you to use too high a shutter speed?

The thing is, whether or not they're charging at all or whether they're charging a little or a lot of money, anyone who photographs weddings needs to be fully prepared in terms of both expertise and equipment.

 

[woof woof]

I've only ever seen banding when using the electronic shutter. If that's the problem there are partial work arounds involving using specific shutter speeds which are multiples of the mains frequency, or something like that. Google if needed. I can't say I've ever seen banding when using the mechanical shutter.

If you were using an electronic shutter it'd probably be best to switch to mechanical.

 

[sk66]

Silent Shutter Banding | Enthusiast Photography Blog

silent shutter on mirrorless cameras, how to avoid banding with silent shutter, Sony A7riii, Sony A9, Sony A7iii, Nikon Z, Canon R, banding

enthusiastphotoblog.com

FWIW, it's not limited to mirrorless cameras... it applies to live-view photography with a DSLR as well.

 

[ancient_mariner]

Silent Shutter Banding | Enthusiast Photography Blog

silent shutter on mirrorless cameras, how to avoid banding with silent shutter, Sony A7riii, Sony A9, Sony A7iii, Nikon Z, Canon R, banding

enthusiastphotoblog.com

FWIW, it's not limited to mirrorless cameras... it applies to live-view photography with a DSLR as well.

This used to be a problem for me photographing scientific materials on a lightbox using a digital compact.

 

[Garry Edwards]

Silent Shutter Banding | Enthusiast Photography Blog

silent shutter on mirrorless cameras, how to avoid banding with silent shutter, Sony A7riii, Sony A9, Sony A7iii, Nikon Z, Canon R, banding

enthusiastphotoblog.com

FWIW, it's not limited to mirrorless cameras... it applies to live-view photography with a DSLR as well.

That's interesting, do you know why? Personally I've never used live-view, preferring to connect directly to a laptop.

 

[sk66]

That's interesting, do you know why? Personally I've never used live-view, preferring to connect directly to a laptop.

I should have said "cameras that have silent shutter with live-view capability"... it doesn't apply if the camera drops out of live-view to take the still photo using the mechanical shutter.

It's due to the rolling activation/readout of the sensor lines required for constant output (mirrorless/live-view/video), which is typically at about *1/15 for a FF sensor (uncompressed raw image)... so for all sensor lines to see the same number of cycles (brightness) the SS has to be longer than ~1/15sec. Or it has to be in a multiple of the power cycle (Hz) like a mechanical shutter needs to be (but at faster shutter speeds the rolling shutter can cause distortion instead).

*Apparently the Sony A9 has a much faster readout than typical.

 

[sk66]

I realize I may not have made the answer clear...

Make sure you are using the mechanical shutter, which also makes using flash a viable solution. And use a SS that is some multiple of the power supply if you are dependent on a significantly fluctuating light source like LED/fluorescent and cannot use flash instead (50hz, 1/50, 1/100, etc).

 

[Me²]

Interesting info. Thanks all.