Today, I took photos in a children’s dance school, not as part of a pro photo shoot, but being a spectator in a class. I did not use any flashes – just a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS
It turned out that motion blur was not the problem (the girls were not vary fast at that age), but the flickering fluorescent light caused all sorts of weird colour casts. The light tubes were not only quite dim – they flickered between pinkish and greenish colours. To make matters worse, different light tubes in the studio flickered with different phase relative to each other, so in some of my images, part of the frame had pink cast and another part – green.
Normally, I would correct the colour in post-processing, aiming to create realistic skin tone. However, with colour gradients across the frame, often the only option was to convert the photo to black-and-white. Still, today’s shoot was the case where being spontaneous and unobtrusive mattered more than creating high-quality lighting conditions.
