I'm going to be taking many photos of girls basketball in the upcoming months using a 60D, 100mm f/2.8L IS USM, 50mm f/1.4, and maybe a 5dmkii and a 24-105mm f/4L IS if I can find a deal. There is blue padding along the walls of the gym that I plan on bouncing light from a 430ex ii out onto the court. So one of my question is... if I'm bouncing light which gives a definite blu-ish tint, do I have to adjust the white balance to combat that? I suppose I'm thinking that adjusting the white balance would only affect the .jpg image and not the raw image which I will later process in Lightroom. So am I full of crap?
Also, the 9 year old girls don't move that fast, so there isn't a ton of motion blur with a shutter speed of 1/250 of a second, but I'd prefer 1/1000 so I can freeze the "action". And if I kick the iso up to 400, I think I can easily achieve 1/1000. But using flash, I think it prevents me from using shutter speeds faster than 1/250. I think I'm being redundant, but I can manually adjust in the settings so I can get a faster sync with the 430ex ii on the hotshoe of my 60D?
Thanks a ton...
Hi Jdramirez,
You will pick up that blue-ish tint if you reflect your flash off it (known as colour cast). You can just correct this, very easily in post, but if set your white balance correctly, you will save yourself sometime by not having to do it in post. The other thing that I would be a little wary about is mixing you light colours. If you are shooting in a sports hall, the ambient light is likely to have that horrible yellow tint that all sports hall seem to have (from the fluorescent lights they use)... polluting this, with a blue cast could end up giving you a complete headache.
If you crank up the shutter speed, past 1/200th of a second, and open up the aperture, this will cut down the ambiently light, and bring out the added flash light. Also in doing this, you will be able to 'freeze the action' as you wanted.
With the 430exii, you have the option to turn on HSS. This is your High Sync Speed setting, allowing the camera and flash to sync above the 1/200th of a second. I'm not going to go into how that works, but it does... The trade off (there is always one) is that this results in a lower full power flash, and kills the batteries a little quicker. Action photographers often bank multiple flashes together to get more power in HSS and improve the recycle times of the flashes, so they can do multiple frames per second. Obviously this is reliant of owning more than one flash, and a way to trigger them all together. Que the 600EX-RT.
Please, anyone feel free to correct me if any of what I have said is wrong, I'm not a complete strobist guru...yet
